Next-Gen 5G Modems From MediaTek And Qualcomm Debut At MWC 2025

Forbes

31-03-2025

MediaTek's and Qualcomm's new 5G modems
Each spring, Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is the place where the entire mobile ecosystem shows off the best of what it has to offer for the year. Following Apple's announcement of its C1 modem inside the iPhone 16e (which I covered in an earlier article), there was inevitably going to be a response from the two biggest providers of 5G modems, MediaTek and Qualcomm. Both companies have been shipping 5G modems across multiple generations for years. Both companies are also pushing the limits of 5G connectivity by using AI, incorporating satellite functionality and breaking the 10 Gbps barrier.
While MediaTek and Qualcomm are pushing 5G connectivity forward with the new modems they launched at MWC, they are also prioritizing different aspects of 5G Advanced (3GPP Rel. 18) that could help the eventual transition to 6G. Let's dive into the details of these two new modem chips.
(Disclosure: Like many other semiconductor makers, MediaTek and Qualcomm are both clients of my firm, Moor Insights & Strategy.)
MediaTek's M90 modem was the first to be announced, just ahead of MWC 2025 in Barcelona. The M90 is MediaTek's 3GPP Rel. 17 modem, which the company says also conforms to the upcoming R18 5G-Advanced spec. MediaTek has given the M90 a peak throughput of 12 Gbps, which is a significant improvement over its M80 predecessor, which had a 7 Gbps downlink. MediaTek has also upped the ante by increasing carrier aggregation in sub-6-gigahertz bands from four carriers in the M80 to six carriers in the M90. The M90 also enhances uplink performance by 20% over the M80 by utilizing advanced transmit switching.
With this device, MediaTek is also focused on the future with support for both 3GPP NTN and IoT-NR standards, which were introduced in 3GPP Rel. 17. This gives the modem satellite connectivity, which MediaTek previously enabled via a standalone NTN-IoT chip that had to sit alongside a 5G modem chip or operate entirely on its own. I believe that MediaTek's integration of NTN satellite connectivity will help to drive the industry forward; in time, it will be expected of both carriers and OEMs that these capabilities will be integrated at little to no additional cost. (For more context on satellite connectivity, see my 'State of 5G' roundup from last month, my recent article on the T-Mobile/SpaceX partnership and my colleague Will Townsend's recap of interesting telecom developments at MWC.)
The M90 also features MediaTek's second-generation AI for modems, a.k.a. MediaTek Modem AI 2.0, which the company says recognizes usage patterns and network environments to optimize connectivity and maximize performance. According to MediaTek, Modem AI 2.0 can also detect device orientation and usage scenarios to maximize connectivity performance in different environments. MediaTek says that its Smart Antenna technology can also identify an operating environment and boost throughput by as much as 30% through optimizations.
Mediatek's focus on power efficiency was also evident with the M90 modem as the company introduced its UltraSave 4.0 solution for 5G power savings. MediaTek claims that UltraSave 4.0 reduces average power usage by 18% compared to the M80. Additionally, MediaTek says it is implementing a 3GPP Rel. 17 feature called Paging Early Indication to reduce idle power by 15% over the M80. This means that the M90 is a significantly faster modem than the M80, yet also has considerably lower active and idle power usage.
During MWC 2025, MediaTek announced that it had successfully validated performance for the M90 with Keysight using an emulator in a lab. While this isn't necessarily relevant to the consumer experience, it does reinforce that MediaTek's modems are indeed as quick as claimed. The company seems to be targeting mobile, customer premises equipment, IoT and automotive applications with the M90; I expect that it won't be long until we see a T900-series platform for FWA and CPE applications like we have with the M70 and M80. The T-series is a full RF-SoC platform that MediaTek has created for faster and easier integration into hotspot and FWA CPE solutions.
MediaTek has done exceptionally well in the 5G FWA realm, taking advantage of the first 5G killer app with fixed wireless broadband. The company also has the M60 modem, which it announced in 2023, specifically designed for 5G RedCap solutions, predominantly for IoT applications due to its low cost and lower throughput. The M60 powers the company's T300 RF-SoC for RedCap, which is much more cost-effective than something like an M90 for IoT applications, but is still 3GPP Rel. 17-compatible, which is necessary to support RedCap.
Many consumers won't notice anything different about the Qualcomm X85, but those who have been following Qualcomm for a while will notice the missing Snapdragon branding. That's because the introduction of Qualcomm's Dragonwing brand has led the company to reorganize its branding. Now, products like modems, CPU cores and GPU cores that bridge multiple markets and functions will carry only Qualcomm branding; the Snapdragon and Dragonwing brands will be used for more vertical-specific applications. (This is explained in more detail in Patrick Moorhead's high-level assessment of Qualcomm's announcements at MWC.)
Branding aside, the Snapdragon X85 is the latest of the company's dozen-plus different 5G modems released since 2018. While Qualcomm's modem generations are sometimes hard to nail down, the company has released at least one new 5G modem each year during that time. Qualcomm says that the X85 is its eighth-generation 5G modem-to-antenna solution and its fourth generation of AI-powered 5G connectivity.
Qualcomm's top-end modems have been capable of 10 Gbps per second peak speeds ever since the X65 in 2021, but with the X85, Qualcomm increases that to 12.5 Gbps to once again claim the fastest 5G modem crown. The X85 is designed to support 5G Advanced, 3GPP Rel.18 features and will once again primarily target Android smartphones, much like its predecessors. The AI tensor processor inside the X85 is 30% faster than the preceding generation at performing inference tasks, which now enhances performance, coverage, latency and power efficiency.
Qualcomm also claims that the X85 is the first modem with 400-megahertz downlink carrier aggregation in the sub-6-gigahertz spectrum, as well as the first with uplink carrier aggregation (200 megahertz) with four layers. Like its competition, it also supports up to 6x carrier aggregation, which is how it can achieve the 400 megahertz of bandwidth. Qualcomm also supports switched uplink with Rel. 17 and supplemental uplink for China. The X85 also supports up to 3.7 Gbps of uplink throughput thanks to the 200-megahertz 4x Uplink CA. This means that Qualcomm's 5G modem continues to be the fastest in the land, with global band support for all bands ranging from 600 megahertz up to 41 gigahertz. Qualcomm says that this covers more than 10,000 different band configurations, which makes it one of the most capable modems on earth.
Qualcomm has also integrated 5G NTN support into the X85, but the company had already integrated that functionality into its flagship modems since the X80 was announced last year. In addition to NTN support, there is also support for industrial IoT applications like 5G TSN (time-sensitive networking) and 5G Ethernet, which both seek to enable 5G for private industrial networks. These features should help Qualcomm and its partners leverage 5G in manufacturing and other industrial applications where Ethernet or wires can inhibit flexibility and production uptime.
The company also touted another unique feature with support for the Future Railway Mobile Communication System, which is a new 5G standard specifically focused on supporting connectivity on European railways. (If you've ever experienced connectivity on trains, it's generally not very good, and moving quickly between cell sites can impact battery life.) This new system will replace the old GSM-R, which is an outdated 2G standard for railways; for comparison, GSM-R has a 9.6 Kbps bitrate, while FRMCS is capable of 100 Mbps. FRMCS also supports higher-speed trains up to 500 km/h, while GSM-R supports only up to 400 km/h.
Qualcomm's target markets for the X85 modem are, unsurprisingly, smartphones, mobile broadband devices, FWA, industrial IoT and satellite communications. I would again expect that we will see the X85 first in some smartphones, quickly followed by 5G FWA, CPE, PCs and IoT applications. At MWC 2025, Qualcomm also announced the Dragonwing FWA Gen 4 Elite, which is powered by the Qualcomm X85 modem and a 40 TOPS NPU for 5G AI applications. Qualcomm also announced the X82 — a less expensive, featured-down modem — to accompany the X85 for more mainstream applications. Both modems are already sampling to customers, with commercially available devices expected in the second half of this year.
While we are still quite a way away from a 6G standard, 5G Advanced (3GPP Rel. 18) is the first step in that direction. And although operators like China Mobile and T-Mobile are only beginning to talk about 5G Advanced networks, 5G Standalone networks are necessary to even start thinking about them.
Leading global operators including Reliance Jio are already using 5G SA but will still need devices that use modems like the MediaTek M90 and the Qualcomm X85 to enable those capabilities. One other thing of note is that previous-generation modems also claimed to support 5G Advanced features, with that standard being frozen as of June 18, 2024. It will be interesting to see which of those devices get equipped with Rel. 18 features once 5G Advanced starts to be rolled out by operators.