Qualcomm Unveils 5G Modem for Industrial IoT

On the inauguration day of China Tech Day, Qualcomm announced the first 5G-NR IoT modem Qualcomm 315. This is a purpose-built modem for gigabit-class, high-performance Industrial IoT (IIoT) use cases, directly addressing the immediate market need for higher speeds, capacity, and efficiency.

Many often wrongly equate 5G IoT to much publicized, and over-used applications such as remote-controlled surgeries. Those use cases, called “Mission Critical Services” are the holy grail of 5G IoT, and efforts are on in terms of standardization, prototyping, etc., to make them a reality. However, when you look at the real needs of the IoT market, especially IIoT, they are not as glamorous, yet extremely important, high-value, and immediate.

5G IoT markets and use cases

One can divide the 5G IoT use cases into two groups. The first group requires relatively lower data speeds (few kbps to Mbps), extended coverage, extremely long battery-life (measured in years), lower complexity and cost. Utility metering, environmental sensing are good examples of such services. These use cases are currently being addressed by Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technologies such as LTE-M (aka eMTC) and NB-IoT. These technologies were introduced in LTE, but are designed to be forward compatible with 5G, meaning…