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by ksec
532 days ago
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>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/ |
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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.