SAN FRANCISCO – Qualcomm today announced general availability of its LTE Broadcast Software Developer Kit (SDK). Developers will now have access to APIs for all regions and networks that are testing and deploying the network technology.
During his keynote at Qualcomm’s annual Uplinq developer conference, CEO Steve Mollenkopf said network operators are using the LTE Broadcast SDK in combination with Qualcomm’s middleware in order to build applications. He added that 30-plus developers are working with the SDK today.
Mollenkopf also touted the technology as “efficient, easy, and potentially unlimited because it’s broadcast.”
Qualcomm’s LTE Broadcast solution is built for evolved Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (eMBMS), which packages a Snapdragon processor with forward error correction technology, broadcast middleware, multimedia services and an interface for LTE Broadcast application development.
The LTE Broadcast SDK is available now.
LTE Broadcast has already been deployed in markets like South Korea. In the U.S., Verizon Wireless has put a big focus on the technology, which it showed off at this year’s Super Bowl in January.
Along with longer range broadcast technology, Mollenkopf talked about Qualcomm’s LTE Direct, a device-to-device proximal discovery protocol with a half-mile radius. He called it “scalable, universal, always-on, global” and said the technology is already being built into its chipsets.
Outside of the LTE Broadcast news, Mollenkopf devoted much of his Uplinq keynote to talk about proliferation of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chipset. He said there have been over a billion smartphones based off Snapdragon as of 2014 and that the company shipped 750 million chipsets in 2013.
“That scale is going to go into a lot of adjacent markets,” Mollenkopf said.
He discussed Qualcomm’s role in wearables, pervasive computing, connected cars and the Internet of Things (IoT). Qualcomm’s AllJoyn open-standard protocol for IoT has spawned the AllSeen Alliance, which Mollenkopf said today has more than 60 members.
Filed Under: IoT • IIoT • Internet of things • Industry 4.0, Infrastructure