‘We are just pack-rats of technology,’ LitePoint director of marketing says
Adam Smith, director of marketing for test company LitePoint, said that the company’s focus this year is on supporting the scaling of 5G, through new products that focus on make it economical to test multiple devices (four devices in parallel, in this case). Smith, who has called the 5G era “early, ambiguous, and challenging” said that the company’s new IQgig-5G product for millimeter wave devices (demos here and here) helps answer the question of “how do we get from just prototype volume of these millimeter wave phones, to shipping tens of millions of phones.”
“As we move forward from 2G/3G/4G, now into a 5G reality, we are just pack-rats of technology. We’re not throwing away any of the old stuff, but we’re adding new stuff, so we’re packing a lot of stuff into this little, compact form factor of a phone,” Smith said.
Smith also said that the company is particularly excited about the upcoming availability of new unlicensed spectrum in the area of 6-7 GHz, opening up more than a gigahertz of new spectrum and which LitePoint is ready to support with testing capabilities.
Smith said he expects to see devices with that spectrum support in the mid-to-late part of this year and “people are developing as we speak,” he added. “It’s a big change. The last time we saw this much spectrum open up in an unlicensed band was about 20 years ago.”
Another trend he sees is that multiple wireless technologies are implementing the ability to enable indoor positioning capabilities, direction-finding or gesture recognition.
Watch the full interview with Smith below: