The Wild Technology That Will Make 5G Wireless Work

Companies such as Qualcomm are reimagining networks to let them connect just about everything—from drones to surgical instruments.

Companies such as Qualcomm are reimagining networks to let them connect just about everything—from drones to surgical instruments.

Wireless technology is a stone soup of acronyms, jargon, numbers, and marketing gibberish that the industry likes to boil down into terms like "4G," the technology used by today's phones. (It's also known as LTE, which stands for "long-term evolution"—as if that clarifies anything.) Now tech companies are talking about 5G, and Qualcomm has announced its first 5G modem chip, the Snapdragon X50, for phones and other gadgets. No surprise: 5G will be faster than 4G. But it will also bring tens or even hundreds of billions of new devices online.

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