Qualcomm is currently working on a type of peer-to-peer wireless technology that’ll be demonstrated next week at the GSMA Mobile World Congress. The service, called FlashLinq, enables mobile devices to discover each other automatically and and to communicate with each other at broadband-like speeds without needing any infrastructure. A trial with SK Telecom in South Korea is currently planned.
FlashLinq uses a concept known as ‘proximal communications’, which enables users to connect and communicate directly with other mobile users based on their physical proximity.
Ed Knapp, senior vice president of business development and engineering for Qualcomm, said “By expanding the operator model of managed services to the frontier of proximal communications, Qualcomm continues to demonstrate its leadership in wireless technology and innovation. FlashLinq’s direct discovery and distributed communications allows operators to naturally extend their cellular networks. The technology can efficiently support new and enhanced services in areas such as direct local advertising, geo-social networking and machine-to-machine communications.”
Qualcomm describes FlashLinq as a synchronous TDD OFDMA [time division duplex orthogonal frequency division multiple access] technology that operates on dedicated licensed spectrum. It’s designed to work at ranges of up to a kilometre.