How 5G will affect market providers
Tonya Hall sits down with Ben Edmond, CEO and founder of Connected2Fiber, to discuss how emerging technologies are driving a reinvented network.
This week, after years of open litigation, Apple and Qualcomm finally decided to bury the hatchet, just as the two were entering a possible new phase of continuing lawsuits in US federal court.
Apple, after losing yet another judgment of patent violation in its ongoing battle with the wireless technology firm last month, was facing the very real possibility of import bans. The settlement, as described by Apple, includes a six-year licensing agreement on Qualcomm technologies, with a two-year option to extend, as well as a multi-year chipset supply agreement.
As far as I am concerned, there couldn’t be a better possible outcome for everyone involved. The biggest winner? Apple’s customers.
Many of the company’s customers will attest that the quality of Apple’s wireless chipsets in the iPhone and iPad have declined substantially since the company switched entirely over to Intel baseband processors in late 2018, with the introduction of the iPhone XR, iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max.
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Apple began to flirt with Intel chips around the time of the iPhone 7, in September of 2016, where it had released two versions of the model — one for GSM-based LTE networks such as AT&T and T-Mobile, which used an Intel baseband processor, and one for Verizon, which used a Qualcomm chipset instead.
The last time that Apple used Qualcomm in all of its iOS products was at the launch of the iPhone 6S, in September of 2015.
Throughput benchmarks on the two chips has varied considerably, and lab-based performance tests have indicated that the Intel chips may have actually been about the same, or even faster than their Qualcomm counterparts on LTE networks.
However, many users have complained about overall LTE (and Wi-Fi) reliability and signal strength, particularly in newer versions of iOS. Much of Qualcomm’s lawsuits with Apple have been on software-related patent issues, and Apple has been quick to make modifications to their stack to remove those infringements — almost certainly at the cost of reliability and real-world performance on the iPhone and iPad.
Going forward, this settlement has a number of implications. First, if the settlement involves software patents covered by the litigation, then these features, codecs and other optimizations for wireless connectivity can be folded back into iOS, even if it means these are running strictly as software on top of Intel’s baseband chips. In turn, owners of current Apple devices, going back as far as the iPhone 7 or possibly even earlier, can take advantage of them — and Apple could roll these fixes back into iOS within weeks.
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