I thought I was the coolest college student in 2004, when I could check my e-mail during lectures with my Nokia 3650 mobile phone. However, GPRS network coverage was spotty in rural State College, Pennsylvania, and I don’t believe I ever experienced the 40-kb/s data rate I was promised. Fifteen years later, the behavioral patterns of you, I, and seven billion other mobile-phone users have largely driven today’s cellular technology to deliver higher data rates with today’s LTE-Advanced Pro and tomorrow’s 5G technologies.
A recent study by Juniper Research estimates that average smartphone consumption will rise from 2 GB per month in 2017 to 5 GB per month by 2021. We are the very reason why recent cellular modems like Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X20 and Intel’s XMN 7560 are designed to support up to 1-Gb/s downlink speeds using a combination of MIMO, carrier aggregation, and the 256-QAM modulation scheme...