Qualcomm chips to power satellite tech in Chinese smartphones

[Hamartia Antidote]

Qualcomm chips to power satellite tech in Chinese smartphones

Chipmakers from MediaTek to Samsung bring 'non-terrestrial' messaging to phones

asia.nikkei.com

BARCELONA, Spain -- Mobile chip developer Qualcomm is working with Chinese handset makers Honor, Oppo and Xiaomi to introduce smartphones with satellite-enabled communications capabilities, the U.S. company said on Monday.

The announcement comes as leading chipmakers around the globe, including MediaTek and Samsung, are also racing to bring satellite-based communications to mass market smartphones in hopes of kickstarting a sluggish mobile market.

"Snapdragon Satellite enables [companies] to offer truly global coverage from pole to pole and can support two-way messaging for emergency use, SMS [short message service] messaging and other messaging applications," Mike Roberts, Qualcomm's vice president of global product marketing, said at a media briefing on Monday.

The announcement was made ahead of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the most important industry fair for wireless technology.

Qualcomm rival MediaTek of Taiwan made its own announcement ahead of MWC, saying it is partnering with Motorola, a Lenovo Group company, and Bullitt, a U.K.-based builder of rugged mobile devices, to demonstrate 5G non-terrestrial networks (NTN) on smartphones.

MediaTek's first approach is to incorporate such tech into a standalone chip -- dubbed the MT6825 -- that can be used in flagship smartphones to offer this new communication feature, said the company's president, Joe Chen. "We will later integrate the satellite tech into the modem and the core system on a chip as well," Chen told Nikkei Asia.

Samsung Electronics unveiled ahead of MWC that it is working to integrate satellite communications tech into the company's own Exynos modem solutions, with the aim of accelerating the commercialization of 5G satellite communications and potentially paving the way for the 6G-powered "internet of everything" era.

Qualcomm first unveiled its satellite communications solutions in January in collaboration with Iridium, a global satellite communications provider. Qualcomm said such technology will be embedded in its Snapdragon 5G modem-RF system and will be used in next-generation smartphones available from the second half of 2023. Snapdragon Satellite can also be used in other devices, including laptops, tablets and connected vehicles, the company said.

Huawei became the first company to bring satellite communications to smartphones last September, linking its Mate 50 with China's BeiDou navigation satellite system.

However, Huawei's smartphone sales have been shrinking and are mainly limited in China due to Washington's blacklisting of the company, which has cut off its access to American technologies.

Days after Huawei's announcement, Apple said its iPhone 14 and 14 Pro range would also support text messaging via satellite networks, as well as location sharing services.

So far, satellite communications features are not widely used in smartphones or other consumer electronics but they could become more prevalent as more chipmakers and electronics manufacturers work to enable such technologies.

Non-terrestrial communications tech, as it is also called, is mostly only used in remote regions, like mountainous areas, deserts or in the middle of the ocean. It is often used in emergencies, disaster assistance or other special cases in which there is no wireless communications coverage.

 

[BHAN85]

They are waiting for the Americans to do the hard work, then Chinese companies will copy and sell by half price.