5G Moto Mod Running On Motorola Moto Z3 At Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit

By Nathan Kirsch

The Motorola Moto Z3 with the aging Snapdragon 835 SoC might be one of the more underwhelming phones released it 2018, but it does support the upcoming 5G Moto Mod. That makes it is the first smart phone on the market that is up-gradable to 5G. So, if you want to be the among the first to enjoy the faster speeds and lower latencies of Verizon 5G this device might be appealing to you. We got a chance to see the Moto Z3 running on the Verizon 5G network at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit and wanted to share with you want we experienced.

Moto Mod 5G Case

Just like other Moto Mods on the market, you simply snap this 5G Moto Mod at the back of the smartphone and you are up and running.

. For the live demonstration, the company had the Moto Z3 with the 5G Moto Mod.. For the live demonstration, the company had the Moto Z3 with the 5G Moto Mod.

Inside the 5G Moto Mod are 10 antenna modules. Four of them are Qualcomms QTM052 antenna modules for mmWave functionality, two of them are sub-6 GHz connectivity, and the other four are for LTE service. The Qualcomm QTM052 antennas are spread around the enclosure to ensure that you’ll get good speeds no matter how you are holding it. Motorola placed one front facing, one rear facing and then there are two on the sides of the device to ensure the best beam forming capabilities.

Inside the enclosure we were told by Motorola that there was a Snapdragon 855 SoC and a Snapdragon X50 modem. We thought the Snapdragon X50 modem would be compatible with the Snapdragon 835 SoC that is running inside the Moto Z3, but that doesn’t appear to be the case here.

Motorola showed a speed test with 50MB, 250MB, 1GB and 2GB file sizes. While waiting out turn to take pictures and videos we noticed speeds ranging between 16 seconds to 20 seconds with the 1GB file download test. When it was our turn we got a time of 19 seconds.

Verizon 5G Cell Tower

This was with the 5G tower located in the room about 25 feet away with direct line of site with the back of the phone. Our download speeds were shown to be about 400 Mbps on this application and when we asked where were the 1Gbps speeds that have been touted all day they said it was a limitation of the 5G tower setup in the room. It turns out hat the setup at the hotel conference room has just a single 39GHz millimeter wave 5G network. That means about 100MHz worth of spectrum was being utilized while full 5G tower sites in the wild will have 400MHz to 800MHz of spectrum. So, this demo showed working file transfers on the 5G network, but not on a fully optimized network nor device.

You can see a quick video clip of the 1GB download test in the Tweet we made above. It will be interesting to see how the Motorola ‘Odin’ smartphone performs on the 5G network as this mobile device is expected to be the Motorola Moto Z4 and will use the upcoming flagship with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 SoC.