The engineers at Marvell have announced the PXA1801, which they claim to be the “Industry’s First Single-chip World Modem” thanks to the ridiculous amount of standards it supports. Their modem does both flavors of LTE, meaning it’ll handle Verizon’s full division duplex LTE and Sprint’s as yet to launch time division duplex LTE network; it’ll do HSPA+ up to 42 Mbps, which is right up T-Mobile’s ally; it’ll do TD-SCDMA, which China Mobile, the world’s largest operator, uses for their 3G network; and should you be out in the middle of nowhere, there is of course support for GSM networks. Marvell says this modem can be shoved in smartphones, tablets, laptops, cars, set-top-boxes, and even TVs. While pricing information hasn’t been released, this modem is supposed to come in at a lower cost than current solutions on the market. We also have absolutely no clue when the first products to feature this thing will be out.
The thing is, will Marvell’s new technology even end up leaving the labs? The market is dominated by Qualcomm, Broadcomm, and Intel, who purchased Infineon’s wireless unit last year. The only products we know of that actually use Marvell’s chips are the BlackBerries made by Research in Motion. We can only imagine how uneasy the senior executives at Marvell must be feeling now that one of their largest customers is so close to kicking the bucket that investors have started asking RIM management to sell the company.
Anyway, the real “world modem” we’d like to see is one that can support the barrage of 4G and 3G frequencies that operators use around the world. Hell, even AT&T and Verizon have said that it’s going to be a while until 4G LTE devices can be made to support both their networks. Fix that first, then let’s talk about supporting Chinese 3G later.