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Qualcomm’s Phone Chips for India a Sign of Further Diversification
This week, Qualcomm is introducing three new Snapdragon systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) on the South Asian subcontinent. While there is nothing unusual about cascading products from more to less developed markets over time, this introduction is tailored rather specifically.
The main positioning of this Snapdragon suite is to bring advanced features to a market unlikely to swing over to 5G cellular anytime soon. A prime example of such a feature is WiFi6. All the products, which fall in the middle of Qualcomm’s overall 4G lineup, have the ability to transmit and receive WiFi6, the latest version of the wireless LAN technology. WiFi6 can be adopted piecemeal — as it involves no infrastructure investment, only a WiFi6 router and enabled devices — and is therefore likely to come on stream in India much sooner than 5G. For higher capacity and throughput, the new parts include support for more WiFi antennas (eight, up from four) and a more efficient way to manage multiple client devices. For better security, they can use WPA3, the latest protocol. Also, something called target wake-up time lets phones power down unless it’s their designated moment to transmit or receive.
Kedar Kondap, vice president of Snapdragon product management, told a group of analysts that of the 8 billion connections all over the globe, half of…
