At Mobile World Congress (MWC) there were two main areas of focus for MediaTek from a cellular connectivity perspective: 5G and 6G, according to Robert Moffat, Director Sales & Business Development Europe at MediaTek.
Currently MediaTek are investing in both, as they announced the launch of their M90 modem at the event, which supports Release 17 from 3GPP as well as Release 18, demonstrating the company’s approach to ensuring its solutions are future proof. This approach lends itself well to the continually evolving nature of cellular standards, encapsulated by the retirement of 2G and 3G networks as the industry looks to 4G, 5G and perhaps even 6G, to service their needs.
Investment in 5G has been significant, but 6G is seemingly on the horizon – if the conversations being had at trade shows like MWC are any indication. My question to Moffat being: will you always make sure solutions are future-proof because of this?
In response, Moffat said he believed that 5G hadn’t been properly utilised yet: “In Europe, we’re lagging behind with 5G Standalone (SA) deployment. Non-standalone, where you’re anchored to the 5G core, all operators went with that because it was the quickest way to deploy … But then you’re dependent on legacy 4G.”
In other regions, however – using China as an example – Moffat cited 80% having access to 5G SA – whereas this figure is 2% in Europe.
“Trying to help the end user, trying to drive high throughput, is being done with non-standalone … but in terms of the other benefits of low latency, reliable connectivity, 5G SA is a strong step in that direction, and it’s not been deployed widely yet in Europe,” explained Moffat.
The point being: 5G has huge potential, and end users will benefit if its capabilities are more widely deployed, and that 6G is a little way off yet.
“All the large players have their own concept of how they see 6G and what direction they think it should take,” Moffat added. “Getting the consensus … signing off the specification will take a while, as it did in 5G.”
M90 modem
The main showcase for MediaTek at MWC from the cellular side was its M90 modem. This modem is the company’s third-generation device with notable improvements including its uplink speeds, at 20% compared with previous generations, and downlink down to 12 gigabits per second.
The improvement in uplink speed was important, said Moffat, because of the increased number of people streaming and uploading videos.
Other key features included its support of millimetre wave (mmWave) technology and non-terrestrial (NTN) communications. Currently, there are costs associated with mmWave technology – from a cost perspective and infrastructure perspective – that require further investment.
“There are two parts to that,” said Moffat (in reference to NTN communications). “There’s a low-data bandwidth called IoT NTN in the standards … we’ve rolled that into the M90 so that if a smartphone customer picks up an M90-based device, they can have that embedded without having a separate component.
“But we also support new radio (NR) NTN, where you have the possibility of having a standards-based solution to give you voice and data connectivity much like you would expect on a standard terrestrial connection.”
The standards-based solutions the company decides to roll out and invest in depend on the conversations they have with key players and customers in the industry.
“Customer demand is key,” noted Moffat. “We’re working beyond a five-year horizon in the cellular space, it changes so quickly that [it] can be difficult, but we have to work with everyone in the ecosystem.
“Like working with the likes of Google on the Android horizon. Where is Android going in terms of an operating system? What’s required in that space? What about cellular connectivity?” By asking these questions, they’re given a clearer picture of where they can put their money: in 2024 alone, MediaTek invested $4 billion in research and development.
Investment in AI
Of the technologies MediaTek has invested in, AI is a stand out.
“We’ve got different flavours of AI: of course we’ve got the consumer-facing generative AI (GenAI) that is in our products, but also in terms of the modem,” explained Moffat. “We’ve got what’s called MediaTek Modem AI [technology], something that we’ve been working on for a few years, and it’s in the modem itself, rather than in the user-facing domain. This identifies traffic patterns and detects device orientation and user scenarios. It trains the model to understand behaviours to get better connectivity.
“A simple example is you get on a plane, turn on aeroplane mode and the modem is switched off. When you land at your destination, you turn your device on, and it goes through the scenario of trying to find the network. You can train the model to identify where you are and get a quicker connection.”
The example of the modem shows how AI can work in the background, behind the scenes, delivering better performance to the user who may be completely unaware of what’s behind the performance improvements, but they may notice they are disonnectedless and less.
“That’s what people really want,” stressed Moffat.
By working closely with language model providers like Google and Meta, these models are running on MediaTek’s devices “out of the box”, and they also offer a software development kit (SDK) called Neuropilot, which provides developers with the ability to develop AI solutions.
The question of where these AI models should be run – whether this is in the Cloud or on device – needs to take a nuanced method. “We need to support them all, depending on the customer, depending on the region, depending on the use cases. Some are going to be run purely in the Cloud and if they are … it’s about having best-in-class connectivity, because you need to be able to get that data from the Cloud to the device, the device to the Cloud, as quickly as possible.”
What is exciting about AI, Moffat concluded, is that “we’ve only scratched the surface”, a statement that applies well to 5G and 6G also. We can expect more to come as and when 5G’s full capabilities are utilised.
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