Only last week, when Qualcomm announced a deal with Nokia for its small cell chips, we speculated that the company might be preparing to re-enter the macro base station market for the first time for two decades. Now that has been confirmed, with Qualcomm announcing a roadmap to launch three new baseband and RF chipsets which will address macro and micro networks as well as small cells, targeting larger base stations for the first time since it sold its infrastructure chip assets to Ericsson in 1999. The new SoC products will support open RAN specifications and support 5G on “all key global bands” including sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave. There are three families on the roadmap, to be available for…