SAN DIEGO — Qualcomm this week took a walk down memory lane to showcase its long history of innovation in wireless communications and contend that it’s leading the industry today as 5G deployments gather momentum.

The vendor invited more than a hundred analysts and reporters to its headquarters to detail its strategy for 5G. Its message, a bit nuanced, aimed to balance the strength of the capabilities it’s developed for 5G with the sometimes lackluster real-world scenarios that some network operators have deployed in 5G thus far. Qualcomm executives were careful not to put too much pressure on operators, but the theme underlined most of its proclamations throughout the event.

Weaknesses in 5G, particularly around the coverage of early millimeter-wave (mmWave) deployments in the United States, will become a moot point as operators take advantage of more technology built into 5G standards, according to Qualcomm. The company’s technological skills, patents, and engineering talent were acclaimed on stage and in product demos throughout the event.

“I’ve been through all the mobile transitions, and the 5G transition is the most complicated and the fastest that we’ve been through so far,” said Jim Thompson, CTO and executive vice president of engineering at Qualcomm. Reminiscing about the early days of 4G LTE, he added that it too “was not very good” in initial deployments. Advancements came later to 4G LTE and continue to this day.

A lot of fundamental work gets done at Qualcomm well before technologies hit the market, and 5G is no different. It’s the culmination of many years of research and development, according to Thompson. While the initial launch of 5G is primarily about mobile broadband for smartphones “because that’s what really pays the bills,” future standards releases will provide the “outer ring” for new services and capabilities in IoT and ultra-reliable, low-latency applications, he explained.

“We are almost always first to come out with products, and that’s because our product teams are pretty closely aligned with what’s going on in our research and our standards group, and so we can understand probably ahead of most other companies what’s actually going to be finalized in the standards,” he said. “That’s really kind of like the recipe for success at Qualcomm in wireless.”

Among other feats, Qualcomm claims to be the first company that publicly demonstrated a 5G New Radio and the first to build a prototyped system that delivered a non-line-of-sight mobile over-the-air transmission on mmWave spectrum. “There’s a lot that is going on in 5G. We’ve designed it to be extensible, flexible so that it can support all these types of use cases,” Thompson said.

“We view 5G as being an innovation platform, not just for today but also the future,” he explained. “We’re trying to future proof it and — even though we transition every 10 years or so to a new generation of mobile — in some ways we hope that we’ve added so much flexibility into [5G] that it’ll allow it to go a little longer than 10 years because you can keep adding to it. It won’t run out of steam.”

Qualcomm’s vision for 5G is “much more all encompassing” than what the first wave of 5G launches are delivering today, said John Smee, vice president of engineering at Qualcomm.

“There’s already a huge amount of evolution and expansion built into 5G itself,” he said. Matters of great importance to operators and customers such as coverage and capacity are not a technical challenge, but rather an implementation and deployment challenge that will be addressed by multiple aspects of the 5G framework, he added.

5G introduces network capabilities that were not possible when 4G LTE was designed and Qualcomm has designed the air interface to leverage those core advancements, Smee explained. “Our vision for 5G needed to encompass a large knowledge and leverage all of these different industries that were also advancing.”

It’s those advancements that gives Qualcomm confidence in the “huge roadmap ahead for that continued evolution,” he said. “We have things like SDN, NFV, so not only is the [radio access network] more flexible, the air interference is more flexible. It’s already designed for different spectrum types, it’s already designed for dense spatial reuse, it’s designed for high capacity and low latency.”

Durga Malladi, senior vice president and general manager of 4G and 5G at Qualcomm, concluded the presentations by summarizing the pace of innovation and technological capabilities built into 5G. “It’s almost as if we’re doing all of 4G in one year,” he said.

The dizzying array of implementation strategies and discrepancies in the first wave of 5G deployments will begin to settle down and coalesce in 2020, Malladi said. There’s no reason for some regions of the world to be deploying 5G exclusively in sub-6Ghz spectrum while other regions focus only on mmWave, he added.

5G requires frequency division duplexing (FDD) and time-division duplexing, mmWave and sub-6Ghz spectrum, Malladi said. “There’s a lot that’s going on in 5G,” he said. “Overall [we are] working on delivering the complete 5G vision. We’ve got quite a ways to go but we are working on it.”