Intel has announced the release of a new LTE Advanced Pro modem dubbed the XMM 7560, which is the very first Intel modem to be manufactured using their 14 nanometer process, as well as their first to support Nokia’s new LTE Advanced Pro standard and it boasts speeds of over 1 gigabit per second downlink and 225 megabits per second uplink. The new modem supports up to 5X carrier aggregation, 4×4 MIMO, and 256QAM, making it one of the most flexible, power-friendly, and advanced modems currently on the market for mobile network providers. Combined with Intel’s in-house SMARTi7 transceiver, the modem can support up to 230 carrier aggregation combinations across 35 different LTE bands.
The modem’s band support is among the highest in the industry at the moment, with compatibility across roughly 100 megahertz altogether, around 60 of which can be used for high-speed data services. The modem is specifically designed to allow design flexibility and power savings, making it easy for device makers to put it into everything from smartwatches to cell tower base stations. While no current networks support it out of the box, 8×4 MIMO support is even on board, which means that phones, tablets and smartwatches with this modem are fairly future proof. They will be able to support most variations of “4.9G” that may hit the market in the near future based on bumps in MIMO or aggregation, though they may not be compatible with 5G standards once they begin rolling out commercially.
Intel’s new modem comes on the heels of a consolidated IoT solution that they were developing hand in hand with Amazon, utilizing specialized miOS software to deliver a powerful IoT suite from a single device. Intel’s recent push into the world of network connectivity and IoT points to the possibility of a unified solution suite from them in the near future, though it is worth noting that they did away with their Intel Atom chip lineup not long ago, which means that a unified push into the mobile space would require the creation of a new chipset. For the time being, the XMM 7560, among other solutions, will help carriers and manufacturers keep devices and networks constantly improving on the way to 5G.