[bri3d]

The big problem is patents and copyright. No common wireless standards are open. No wireless standards are feasible to implement. Seriously. It's that bad. Certainly a modern 4G/5G standard is complex from a hardware standpoint to implement - the way you usually do these is using a very powerful embedded DSP, which is also not open (Qualcomm Hexagon is the most reverse-engineered of these if you want to understand what's going on). But the thing that's holding Apple up is purely legal IMO.

[ksec]

>No common wireless standards are open, No wireless standards are feasible to implement.

What is definition of "Open" here?

The current submission is entirely about Open Source 4G/5G. Fabrice Bellard on top of the crazy amount of other stuff he did also made a LTE/NR Base Station Software [1]. WiFi and Bluetooth are also "Open".

>But the thing that's holding Apple up is purely legal IMO

People constantly mistaken having an open standard regardless of patents and an useable product on the market. There is no reason why you cant have a software modem aka Icera that was acquired by Nvidia in the early 10s. And there are no modem monopoly by Qualcomm which is common misconception across all the threads on HN and wider internet. MediaTek, Samsung, Huawei, Spreadtrum and a few others have been shipping 4G / 5G Modem on the market for years.

The only reason why Apple hasn't released a modem 6 years after they acquired the modem asset from Intel is because having a decent modem, performance / watt comparatively to what on market is Hard. Insanely hard. You have Telecoms from top 50 market each with slightly different hardware software spectrum combination and scenario along with different climate and terrains. It took Mediatek and Samsung years with lots of testing and real world usage at the lower end phone to gain valuable insight. Still not as good as Qualcomm but at least it gets to a point no one is complaining as much.

[1] https://bellard.org/lte/

[bri3d]

> What is definition of "Open" here?

Patent unencumbered in a way that someone could make a commercially viable implementation as a "small or midsized" company, as the parent post asked. Open Source proves my point - the issue is not implementation (note - I'm not claiming implementation isn't hard, it is - I certainly know from personal experience that it is and I would never claim to be able to personally build an energy efficient 4G or 5G modem, but I don't think that raw engineering horsepower is what's holding Apple/Intel/NVidia back here).

> MediaTek, Samsung, Huawei, Spreadtrum and a few others have been shipping 4G / 5G Modem on the market for years.

The CCP effectively told Qualcomm to get lost in 2015 and Taiwan settled an antitrust agreement between them and MediaTek in 2018, so MediaTek, Huawei, and Unisoc/Spreadtrum are not good examples here. I believe the South Korean government also intervened on behalf of Samsung. Actually, the list of modem vendors you list pretty much matches exactly the list of governments who prosecuted, fined, and settled with Qualcomm for antitrust.

[RF_Savage]

>Patent unencumbered in a way that someone could make a commercially viable implementation.

Doesn't this exclude all modern cellular standards then?

[msh]

yes.

[throwup238]

If I remember correctly, all the documentation needed to implement a 5G radio approaches 10,000 pages. It’s not only insanely long and complicated but there’s a nasty path dependency with most of 4G which is why Intel and now Apple have such a hard time getting their radios to the finish line. Poaching a few Qualcomm or Broadcom employees with better salaries is one thing but without the cumulative expertise contained within the companies, it’s almost impossible to bootstrap a new radio.