Qualcomm has enjoyed a surprisingly long and scarcely challenged period of dominance of the LTE modem market, at least in smart devices where its ability to integrate with the application processor has been hard to beat. How much longer can its leadership be sustained, as it faces new challenges from MediaTek, Samsung and, eventually, Intel? Specialist players such as Sequans and Altair are carving out interesting markets in the LTE-only markets, and if they can continue to drive down power consumption, they are well placed for some internet of things applications. But the volumes currently remain with 3G/4G handsets, and the downward pressure on prices in that sector has dictated a rapid move towards highly integrated SoCs, the area where…