The San Diego-based mobile chip giant announced it will be launching the world’s first 5G modem, called the Snapdragon X50. The chip could theoretically support download speeds on your smartphone of up to 5 gigabits per second. The average 4G download speed in the United States is 9.9 megabits per second (short of the global average of 13.5 Mbps), according to study from Open Signal published.

• Once cellular networks start offering phones access to gigabit-level download speeds, these devices will start evolving in interesting way. They may, for example, be able to access data in the cloud more quickly than retrieving data from the device’s flash storage.
• Qualcomm said it will start sending samples to customers in the second half of 2017, and phones with the modem inside will begin shipping in early 2018.
• South Korean carrier KT said it will be the first to launch a 5G network for the country’s 2018 Winter Olympics.
• But the LTE network could also improve quite a bit too in that time. Qualcomm also announced on Monday that will be launching the world’s first gigabit speed device for an LTE network.
• Working with Australian telecom Telstra, Netgear will launch a hotspot equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X16 LTE modem.
• The LTE hotspot will provide users with download speeds of up to 1 Gbps. The next generation mobile network, called 5G (or fifth generation), is still many years from becoming a reality, but Qualcomm wants to make sure it’s out ahead of the competition.
  Now Intel is of course trying to prepare for 5G too.
• The company is active in 5G standardization efforts with 3GPP, an international telecom association. The company has also been prototyping and testing 5G modem architecture.