The 3GPP Release 17 specification for 5G introduced some major upgrades – among them support for 1024 QAM, which enables higher data transfer speeds as Samsung and Qualcomm just demonstrated.
Using Samsung 5G vRAN tech running on 2.1GHz (FDD) and 3.5GHz (TDD) and a test unit with a Snapdragon X75 modem, the two companies achieved speeds of 485Mbps with 20MHz bandwidth. This is 20% higher than what’s possible with the 256 QAM that is common on 5G networks today. The X75 modem is featured in the Snapdragon 8/8s Gen 3, by the way.
This is a first time in the industry this was pulled off on an FDD band (Frequency-Division Duplexing as opposed to Time-Division Duplexing).
Anyway, keep in mind that this speed was achieved with using only 20MHz and modern modems can combine multiple streams to achieve higher throughput. For example, last year the two companies demonstrated 4x downlink and 2x uplink carrier aggregation.
An overview of improvements brought by 3GPP Release 17
Samsung says that it is testing 1024 QAM in traditional RAN configurations as well and expects the technology to be commercially available by the end of this year.
