Intel Corp (INTC)

[morrowinder]

Elmer: the Intel modem thing is being oversimplified

As usual for the Troll brigade. I do wish Intel would respond but apparently it isn't really widely known so they are ignoring it.

What isn't being mentioned is that the Apple iPhone7 loses badly to the Samsung Galaxy 7 with both modems. Because it isn't just the modem, its the antenna, the providers signal, environmental conditions etc. that determine LTE performance. So, they are testing in perfect lab conditions and just lowering the signal strength. In the real world it is far more complicated. I just recently got a Google Pixel phone with the latest Qualcomm modem included with Snapdragon 821. My provider is Verizon. I get 66Mbps down and 27 Mbps up with 3 bars according to speedtest from my office. That is no where near the 100Mbit speeds in a lab environment(the samsung phone actual was around 150Mbps I believe) and far below what these modems are alleged to run. And I should point out that 66Mbps is really fast for a phone and 3 times faster than what I used to get on desktop only 5 years ago. And yet we have certain people already convinced the Intel modem is "trash" despite the fact that it performs fine out in the real world. And never mind the fact that the networks themselves(Intel works on ATT and their compatible networks while Qualcomm works on both but is typically sold to Verizon and their CDMA competitors) have different performance characteristics depending on where in the country you are and the equipment upgrades that network has managed to do there. I would actually argue that even as low as 10 Mbps you would have a pretty damn good phone experience. It's not like people run bit torrents on their phone downloading 4k movies all day.