In a raft of pre-MWC announcements, Qualcomm’s big news was the Snapdragon X16 modem chip, which supports the latest generation of 3GPP specifications, LTE-Advanced Pro, and promises gigabit download speeds. The X16 is the first commercially available modem supporting Category-16, says Qualcomm – which means peak downlink speeds of 1Gbps and uplink of 150Mbps. This involves a maximum of 4×20 MHz downlink carrier aggregation across FDD and TDD modes, and 2×20 MHz uplink CA. The new modem also supports LTE in 5 GHz unlicensed spectrum, via LTE-U or LTE-LAA (the latter a feature of the upcoming 3GPP Release 13 specs, along with many of the other LTE-A Pro capabilities featured in the X16, such as dual SIM and dual connectivity…