The 3GPP Release 17 specification for 5G has introduced some significant upgrades, one of which is the support for 1024 QAM. This new feature enables higher data transfer speeds, as recently demonstrated by Samsung and Qualcomm.
By utilising Samsung 5G vRAN technology operating at 2.1GHz (FDD) and 3.5GHz (TDD) along with a test unit containing a Snapdragon X75 modem, the two companies successfully achieved speeds of 485Mbps with 20MHz bandwidth. This speed is 20% higher than what is currently achievable with the common 256 QAM used in 5G networks today. It’s worth noting that the X75 modem is featured in the Snapdragon 8/8s Gen 3 as well.
This marks the first instance in the industry where this speed has been reached using an FDD (Frequency-Division Duplexing) tape instead of Time-Division Duplexing.
It’s important to remember that this speed was achieved using only 20MHz, and modern modems can combine multiple streams to achieve even higher throughput. For instance, last year, the two companies showcased 4x downlink and 2x uplink carrier aggregation.
An overview of improvements brought by 3GPP Release 17
Samsung has stated that they are currently testing 1024 QAM in traditional RAN configurations and anticipate this technology to be commercially available by the end of this year.