Well, it seems as if Intel faces new challenges. As of yesterday
Apple has announced that it won’t use Intel’s 5G modems in
it’s Apple product portfolio in 2020. So Intel is now reducing
production capacity significantly as other brands do not…

use Intel 5g modems in their smartphones at all. Mostly they rely on the functions the Qualcomm processor provides. Some others again rely on Broadcom. Apple is one of the rare customers of Intel 4G and 5G modems so far but it seems as if Apple is not too happy with it’s decision what would explain the quick drawback on the collaboration.

In November 2017, Intel announced substantial advances in its wireless product roadmap to accelerate the adoption of 5G. Intel’s early 5G silicon, the Intel® 5G Modem announced at CES 2017, is now successfully making calls over the 28GHz band. (Credit: Intel Corporation)

However when Intel was showing it’s 5G modems on the CES2017, that brought the 5G train to roll as providers worldwide explained to support 5G on their networks as soon as possible.

Today in Switzerland the auctioning of the 5G frequencies has started with the basic bidding at 220M CHF per frequency block. Swisscom, Salt, Sunrise might start another battle to gain as much frequency blocks as possible (the more you have, the more reliable and stable the network connection will be!). It’ll be interesting to see how much these providers are willing to fork out from their pockets to get these frequency blocks.

According to BR (Bayrischer Rundfunk), 5G frequencies won’t be autionated in Germany this fall but rather in 2019.

In the USA 5G will be launched from late 2018 (AT&T) in 18 major cities to 2020 (T-Mobile) nationwide.

In Austria Drei might roll out 5G in late 2018, early 2019 in major cities (test phase in Vienna is alsready running!)

So all major brands should equip their flagship smartphones with 5G modems as soon as possible to allow the customers to browse the web extremely fast or transmit files blazingly fast with up to 1.4Gbit/s!