Picture the scene: you are at your favourite football match, your team has just scored and you want to upload your thoughts, and some video, to social media.
But you can’t - not because you have lost your phone in all the excitement and cheering but because there are thousands of others trying to do the same thing, clogging up the network and slowing down connectivity to a speed akin to the dodgy defender who just let the goal in.
This is a familiar tale to anyone who has gone to a stadium in the last few years but that is all set to change, thanks to Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ Gigabit LTE .
New technologies, such as the fantastic-sounding 4x4 MIMO, are making sure that a number of current handsets are getting the best out their connection, even when the network is beginning to buckle.
The idea behind 4x4 MIMO is actually quite a simple one, even if the technology behind it is brilliantly complex. In simplest terms, 4x4 MIMO (which stands for multiple input, multiple output) opens up more ‘lanes’ for your data to flow through allowing for quicker download and upload speeds.
4x4 MIMO technology allows for four independent spatial streams to be used by a compatible phone at once, speeding up data transfer.
The Samsung Galaxy S7 was the first 4x4 MIMO-enabled smartphones but since its release there have been a few more - including the Samsung Galaxy S8 range, the HTC U11 and Sony XPERIA ® XZ Premium.
In fact, it was the XZ Premium that was used in a recent test at Wembley Stadium to try out Gigabit LTE speeds in a real-world situation and the results were jaw dropping. In conjunction with EE, and testing the might of Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 835 Mobile Platform, they managed to demonstrate live upload speeds of 110Mbps and download speeds of 750Mbps.
To put that into context: that’s twice as fast as the fastest broadband provider in the UK.
These speeds may seem ridiculously fast for use in a stadium but the technology is needed to withstand what the future holds. We may currently be trying to upload the odd picture to Facebook, but our phones are now much more capable of that.
We have the ability to shoot 4K footage in HDR so why shouldn’t we have the ability to film what’s going on in a stadium in that quality and upload it in a few seconds?
Now, multiply that by thousands as it shouldn’t just be one person that has that ability, but everyone in the stadium. That could mean up to 100,000 people uploading footage in the highest quality at the same time.
A stadium’s infrastructure needs to be able to handle this - and that is why Qualcomm Snapdragon is investing so much in its chip technology and beyond to make sure the next time you are at a football match, your experience is a winning one.
