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Verizon and Qualcomm have completed a trial of a new LTE-Advanced, massive MIMO, that will give next year’s Android phones some major juice in speed. The test trial used equipment from Ericsson and a prototype phone running Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 845 chip and X20 modem. All of these combined demonstrated massive MIMO on consumer-ready devices for the very first time.
“We don’t wait for the future, we build it. And this is another great example of moving the industry forward,” says Nicola Palmer, Chief Network Engineer and Head of Wireless Networks, Verizon. “Massive MIMO is a critical component of our 4G LTE Advancements and will play an important role in 5G technology that will result in single digit latency and scalability in the billions of connections.”
With the use of massive MIMO, customers will see faster speeds on their device, and networks will be able to handle congestion better during busy times. This is especially important to Verizon since they have a lot of unlimited data customers on their network now and the company has seen a decrease in performance on their network for some time now.
Better news for consumers is that this tech was used for commercial usage, and could become available in the first half of next year. The Snapdragon 845 platform is expected to also make its debut with the Galaxy S9 in late February. If all goes well, starting in 2018, you will see massive MIMO unleashed across the US and better network performance and speeds delivered right to your hands.
