The tech industry has seen a blistering pace of innovation and market dominance. Global equity markets are swayed by how Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, Intel, Nvidia perform. Seven out of the top ten companies in S&P500 and three out of the top 10 Dow Jones Industrial Average Index components are tech companies. The meteoritic rise of these giants was primarily fueled by unprecedented advancements in computing, especially mobile computing. So much so that the global economic future is guided by consumers’ mobile-first experiences and technologies that enable those experiences.

In a series of articles, I will explore the…

After pointlessly fighting tooth and nail for almost two years, FTC will now be forced to end the case,
after the latest setback at The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (Ninth Circuit). The Ninth Circuit’s well expected en banc denial, following a series of upsets, put the death nail in the coffin. After the direct, clear, and very short seven-line opinion, I am certain that FTC will not even imagine knocking on the doors of the U.S. Supreme Court.

This decision clears all the clouds hovering around Qualcomm-the country’s 5G crown jewel. This will also have…

Right before the passing of the deadline, as expected, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took another swing at Qualcomm by filing a request to reconsider the recent appellate court decision. But to everybody’s surprise, the FTC Chair and Trump appointee Joseph J. Simons , coming out of recusal, authorized that decision .

This request will again set in motion activities at The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (Ninth Circuit). After a few more weeks of action, I believe, eventually, this case will go into the history books as a great precedent for antitrust law in the…

It is bliss, as an engineer, to witness a whopping 2Gpbs speed on a live commercial network, using an off the shelf device. And that was my experience a few weeks ago, using the new Lenovo Flex 5G on Verizon’s live mmWave network in San Diego . It is even more amusing considering that I had tested 9.6 Kbps (yes, bites per second)) speeds on 2G networks only two decades ago, and 10s of Mbps only a few years ago.

The Flex 5G is the world’s first 5G PC and it’s powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx 5G compute platform…

Every time I see the frontline users chugging along those thick, heavy, oversized rugged phones, I feel there should be a way to make them sleek, and stylish like consumer phones, without compromising on the functionality. And I am delighted to say that Samsung has done exactly that with their Galaxy XCover Pro .

As a friend of mine who is a frontline worker once told me, the design philosophy of ruggedization is to primarily protect the devices, without any regard for looks or convenience. …

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (Ninth Circuit) gave a landmark decision in favor of Qualcomm, on Aug 11 th 2020, in the long running antitrust case brought about by FTC. This was a highly anticipated outcome in the multi-year saga, which saw fortunes go back and forth between the parties. The detailed opinion written by Judge Callahan, representing the panel of three judges, is a tell-a-tale of how FTC mischaracterized Qualcomm’s business model, and how the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (lower court) misjudged the case. The ruling vacated all…

One of the exciting features the recently finalized 3GPP Rel. 16 brings to 5G is the support for Integrated Access Backhaul (IAB). IABs have the potential to be a game-changer, especially for millimeter Wave (mmWave) deployments by solving the key challenge of backhaul. However, the traditional design of IABs offers low efficiency. In this article, I will take a deep dive into IABs, their deployment configurations, and most importantly, the techniques needed to improve their efficiency.

Side Note: If you would like to learn more about 3GPP Rel. 16, check out this article “3GPP Rel. …

The virtualization of cellular networks has been ongoing for some time. But virtualizing the Radio Access Network (RAN) has always been an enigma and was the final frontier for the trend. The rising star of 5G infrastructure business-Samsung-jumped on to the virtualized RAN (vRAN) bandwagon with their announcement yesterday. I think this will prove to be another turning point in moving the industry from decades-old “custom hardware + integrated software,” approach toward the modern, efficient, and flexible vRAN architecture.

What is vRAN and why does it matter?

Even since the dawn of the cellular industry, radio networks were always thought to be the most complex part of the…