It looks like 5G will be a requirement and that putting a modem in the phone separate from the CPU will be the new standard in 2020 for Qualcom.
There are so many different implications for the Librem 5 here that I thought I would just post the link and see where this thread goes.
I don’t see any implications in this article for the Librem 5, unless this Qualcomm SoC drives the production of lower power consumption modem ICs.
Some possible implications that could affect Purism’s Librem 5 market:
1.) Available 4G phones that people want becomming less available in 2020
2.) Late model processor without built-in modem available in market. Should Purism consider making a Librem 6 using a Snapdragon 865 and a separate modem to meet FSF requirements?
3.) Shorter battery life (like the Librem 5) getting more common
4.) Possible people migrating away from Android in to a PureOS phone (Librem 5, Pine, other)
5.) Can Purism build a 24GHz m.2 5G modem card for the Librem 5?
6.) How soon until carriers force everyone out of 4G and in to 5G as verizon did when they quit selling 3G smart phones or 3G service on smart phones several years ago? Suddenly one day they raise data charges significantly because it is so much faster. Your phone somehow drinks-up that data faster than ever, and your Bill’s skyrocket unless you quit using data. Ten minutes on youtube and your month’s allotment of data is gone.
These are just a few things that came to my mind for me.
I think if we could’ve made a snapdragon CPU work with privacy and open-source development we wouldn’t be going to NXP for a chip never used in mobile phones before afaik.
I’ve heard but do not know that 5G is much less secure than 4G. I never followed up on it since I don’t really care about 5G. I’m not overjoyed at new proprietary blobs flooding the phone market and I fail to see a significant use case requiring that much bandwidth for the average consumer.
it’s not a question of “if Purism could’ve” - they COULD but they weren’t PERMITTED to do that.
Not likely. For mmWave 5G, you need different antennas and you probably need to mount them on every edge of the phone, because the mmWave signal gets blocked by the hands.
5G requires 2.5 times more energy than 4G. An M.2 card probably doesn’t have enough cooling to put a 5G modem on it. The 4G modem already requires a 29x33x2.5 mm chip package because of the giant heat spreader, which takes up almost all the room on the M.2 card. From what I have read, all the 5G phones are either using copper metal sheets or evaporative heat pipes to do the cooling, so a simple graphite sheet isn’t enough.
5G is designed to work with 4G using dynamic spectrum sharing (DSS) and carrier aggregation, so I expect 4G to be around for a very long time.
See: https://www.cnet.com/news/no-5g-isnt-going-to-make-your-4g-lte-phone-obsolete/