Ben Timmons, senior director of business development at Qualcomm Europe, admitted it was difficult to unpick an ongoing PR war regarding 5G firsts, but added there was tremendous momentum from manufacturers to commercially launch a 5G device as early as Q1 2019.

Speaking at Qualcomm’s 2018 5G State of Play briefing in London, Timmons (pictured) conceded 5G “seemed distant” even a few months ago, but real activity on the device side and developments around interoperability has made the prospect of the next-generation technology a lot more “tangible”.

Building on recent progress, Timmons still warned it was difficult to identify exactly what people mean when claiming 5G firsts, with vendors, operators, companies like Qualcomm and even national governments all “trying to prove they are in the lead”.

“A lot of the demos and announcements have done quite a lot with 4G technology,” he added, “but used in a particular way, such as Massive MIMO, which is kind of 5G. The good thing about it, however, is that people are committing and want to make it happen, so to be overly critical of announcements, demos, trials and pilots is a bit harsh.”

He said the ecosystem needed to see five to 15 smartphones and other pieces of user equipment working with five or six major infrastructure vendors for 5G, otherwise “we haven’t got anything. And that is at the point we are getting to”.

Route to commercialisation
In his presentation, Timmons stressed the importance of interoperability between its technology (such as the Snapdragon X50 5G modem) with the infrastructure network platform of vendors, which was “vital” to advancing the technology.

He said the company was able to overcome the interoperability hurdle this year, holding a demonstration at Mobile World Congress with Ericsson and Nokia which proved “that the technology we are developing that was actually going to end up in the device worked and would interwork with other infrastructure vendors”.

This milestone, he said, was of utmost importance. Putting it into context, he said the company had been “critical” of early 5G demos which were only based on end-to-end proprietary systems.

“If the network side equipment and device side equipment interoperate big deal, because it’s all your technology. The thing that is really critical is making sure that my device technology works with someone else’s infrastructure technology and that has always been our focus.”

Test device
Central to the company’s 5G developments has been its 5G test phone (pictured, right), which is powered by the X50 chip. Timmons said this device was now used by engineers, infrastructure vendors and operators “to test 5G is working”.

While it is clearly larger than today’s premium smartphones, Timmons said competitors’ 5G test devices (which he did not name) looked more like “a box resembling something like a VCR”.

The test device, along with its X50 chip and the next Snapdragon processor, which will be unveiled at its event in Hawaii later in the year, has given Timmons the confidence Qualcomm has a “real route to commercialisation”.

“For our customers we are confident they will get to market end of Q1 or beginning of Q2 with X50 powered smartphones,” he said. “It may be there is no network there and operators don’t have launch plans in those timeframes but in terms of the process that we are going through, in terms of doing interoperability testing with the infrastructure vendors and developing a commercial smartphone, we are on track.”