Calder McHugh for Yahoo Finance:
Qualcomm is committed to building a sustainable fifth-generation cellular network (5G), which CEO Steve Mollenkopf says will have a big impact on the American consumer.
“I think you’re going to have more speed. Obviously, people like more speed,” Mollenkopf recently told Yahoo Finance’s editor-in-chief, Andy Serwer. “But really, what you’re going to see is, the ability to get access to this will grow dramatically, meaning coverage, availability of just unlimited data plans.”
Qualcomm makes processing chips for phones and is on the frontier of making 5G chips.
Reports exist that Qualcomm will build a 5G chip into Apple’s iPhones to be released in 2020. Qualcomm and Apple recently settled a long-running patent suit — that day, Qualcomm’s shares were trading up 23%. (However, Apple recently acquired most of Intel’s modem business, meaning it could be less dependent on Qualcomm’s chips in the future.)
MacDailyNews Note: As per the costs to consumers for data plans, Mollenkopf thinks costs have the potential to go way down with the advent of 5G (which will really start to pick up steam later in 2020):
Obviously, the carriers have different economics on this, [but] you have tremendous improvement in the cost per bit. One estimate is, [cost] goes down by a factor of 30 — just tremendous business models that are up for grabs as you get that much capacity that comes online. Part of that is due to the technology. Part of it is due to the spectrum allocation. So it’s a real big change in terms of the economics of providing this technology to the consumer.
Competition between carriers for customers coupled with the rise of eSIMs that will make it easy to switch carriers for the best deals should drive prices down for owners of 5G-capable smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches.
Competition in the 5G world and competition in the world of streaming content are starting to look promising for the consumer.
I wish I had your belief I think AT&T, Verizon will screw you every which way they can. American telecommunication companies are utter trash. I happen to be looking at the Verizon website late late last week and just left a sterically they now have for unlimited plans just ridiculous. It’s just American corporate greed
That’s why I dumped AT&T (who I have been with since the introduction of the iPhone) at the begining of this year and gone with one of their lower cost compititors. Now I am paying LESS THAN HALF each month than I was with AT&T. With 5 family lines, that’s a big savings.
. . . I know, AF&T was Cingular at the start of the iPhone days.
Don’t get your hopes up. Why would these robber barons charge less for faster service? Flies in the face of logic. And don’t start me on limited unlimited service.
Not just faster, but with a requirement for many, many more cell towers and transmitters. Higher overhead = Higher prices.
“Higher overhead = Higher prices”
Yes, but with each user tying up the transmiter towers for far, far less time, cariers costs go down.
You still have to pay for the equipment. That overhead may be divided over more usage hours, but unless usage numbers go way up, the share paid by each customer will inevitably go up. The number of users can only expand if there is a huge hidden American population without cellphones.
Medical schools and law schools can now start to rampup departments specialising in emerging diseases caused by the effects of 5G tech.
Yeah I don’t buy this at all. The economics of the carriers is substantial. Yes 5G has great potential and the phones and cell antenna (think access network) will have great throughput….the problem is bandwidth and capacity at the distribution layer of the network. Carriers will have a tremendous burden to install new (think every light pole) antenna infrastructure (Access layer) and resulting fiber backhaul to the distribution layer switching. The fiber needed to sustain the 5G potential is tremendous.