Xcom’s promise to Globalstar: To make ’10 MHz of spectrum look like 50 MHz’

Xcom – a relatively low-profile startup fronted by the son of Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs – has mostly been touting its short-range virtual reality technology in recent months.

But the company’s CEO, Paul Jacobs, appeared during Globalstar’s recent investor day to make a compelling prediction: “Paul asserts his company can make 10 MHz of spectrum look like 50 MHz, enabling greater data throughput,” according to the financial analysts at B. Riley Securities.

Globalstar’s investor day, in New York City, was an in-person-only event. The company did not respond to questions from Light Reading about the event.

Xcom, for its part, has been making announcements about its new extended reality (XR) technology that uses edge computing coupled with virtual reality headsets and highband spectrum to allow users to “move freely, simultaneously and seamlessly through a highly detailed photorealistic interactive digital environment,” according to the company.

However, XR is just one of a handful of technologies mentioned on Xcom’s website. The company’s “products” section also lists a sub-6GHz 5G radio access network that makes “efficient use of radio spectrum” and supports “5-10x gains for download and upload without changes to phones or standards.”

To be clear, Xcom isn’t the only startup promising new technology that can improve the efficiency of wireless communications. Tarana Wireless, pCell provider Artemis and Cohere Technologies have all discussed similar advancements that lie outside traditional wireless standards.

A maturing teaming

For Globalstar, such a technology would be incredibly compelling considering the company owns a completely unencumbered – though slightly diminutive – slice of midband spectrum across vast parts of the globe. Globalstar early last year announced a “global strategic alliance” with Xcom that Jacobs said at the time would offer “significant capacity gains for dense deployments of greater than 4x compared to existing solutions with gains scaling even further up as additional hardware is deployed.”

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