Renesas announces single chip triple-mode LTE modem

A speedy solution for both LTE and 3G

MOBILE DATA IS a fast growing market space and despite many network providers being unable to keep up when it comes to deploying the latest technology on their networks, consumers and business users alike continue to crave faster connection speeds. As such, Renesas latest announcement should at least appease some of these users, as its new single chip triple-mode LTE modem platform offers fast download and upload speeds for both LTE and 3G connected devices.

The chip in question is known as the SP2531 and is based on technology developed by Nokia’s wireless modem team which Renesas acquired back in November of last year. The SP2531 offers LET download speeds of up to 100Mbit and upload speeds of up to 50Mbit, although considering that LTE coverage is still fairly limited the HSDPA speeds of 42Mbit and the HSUPA speed of 11.5Mbit should prove far more interesting for most users.

Renesas promises support for Android, MeeGo and Symbian on the mobile OS front as well as Linux and Windows support for desktop and notebook users which suggests that we’ll find the SP2531 inside smartphones, tablets and standalone modems in the future. The SP2531 will start to sample to partners in March, although mass production isn’t expected to kick off until sometime much later this year which means that we won’t see any devices based on it until early 2012 at best.

It’s frustrating to see companies announce technology that will offer major benefits to how we use technology, just to tell us that we’ll have to wait a year to get our hands on it. In all fairness, in this case it’s not just a matter of getting a chip out the door, but a lot of verification and certification has to be passed as is always the case when we’re talking about anything related to mobile communications. Now we’ll just have to cross our fingers that the mobile operators will have upgraded their networks in time to take advantage of the potential speed boost offered by the devices that will feature the SP2531, but then again it might not be worth it, at least not considering that by then you’ll end up using up your data cap within 5 minutes or less.S|A

The following two tabs change content below.