As operators focus in on 5G as a vector for driving their own sustainability goals while delivering greener operations to enterprises, there's focus on both changing energy supply mix while driving down energy consumption at the network level. For its part, Qualcomm is is researching multiple techniques, including one dubbed Super QAM, which improves the signal quality to increase data speeds thereby reducing transmission time and, as a result, power consumption. Learn more from Ronen Shaked, principal engineer, Qualcomm.

At MWC 2022, Principal Engineer Ronen Shaked demonstrated Super-QAM. To start, he gave the background on how it works: the key idea is to reduce the noise in the receiver in an iterative fashion to incrementally improve the signal quality. With improved signal quality, we can utilize higher order modulation, which improves throughput speeds and increases efficiency.