Is millimeter-wave (mmWave) beating a retreat, or has it only begun to advance? The short-range, high-speed 5G technology has taken a real beating in US perceptions as it has failed to sweep the nation and mmWave phones have remained more expensive than "sub-6" 5G smartphones.
Millimeter-wave technology is "just another band," said Qualcomm SVP of engineering Durga Malladi, and prices will come down when there are a larger volume of mmWave devices to serve globally, a shift he said is coming in 2022.
"Everything starts off in a certain way," meaning expensive, Malladi said in advance of the company's Snapdragon Summit. "But over time, we see a lot of mix-and-match, sub-6 and mmWave going hand in hand, and, more importantly, mmWave becoming a technology that's not just prevalent in the US and Japan."
Europe is starting to roll out mmWave in small ways, but the big change for the market will be China Unicom's launch of mmWave around the Winter Olympics in 2022, Malladi said. Few Chinese handsets currently have mmWave, but that will change if China Unicom starts to demand the technology.
"So, the number of OEMs entering the space will be much more than what you see right now. Today, you see a lot of flagship models along with a few others here and there, but we expect a lot of the Chinese models to come," Malladi said.
Chinese vendors adopting mmWave will end up spilling mmWave into handsets destined for the European market, where the likes of Xiaomi are very popular, he suggested. Those much greater volumes will drive mmWave unit prices down.
One thing Malladi didn't mention is the entry of Qualcomm's lower-cost competitor MediaTek into the mmWave market. At its own annual event earlier in November, MediaTek showed a slide suggesting that it would introduce a high-midrange chipset with mmWave in 2022.
Qualcomm's new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset, which will likely appear in US Samsung Galaxy S22 phones, supports millimeter-wave.