Only PHY is in hardware, indeed with firmware control.

Then, the protocol stacks on top of that are enormous and complex. The software is very large.

Broadcom also tried and failed because they underestimated the task, IMO.

Those who can/could make it happen are those who are willing to invest massively over many years and, ideally who have a sure customer. E.g. Huawei who is willing to take the long view and who ships hundreds of millions of phones.

Intel literally spent billions on this effort and Apple was desperate to use them to avoid being reliant on Qualcomm - and still failed.

Apple’s quarterly revenue is larger than Qualcomm’s market cap. This is clearly about more than the money for them. I wouldn’t be shocked if they spent 10bn and poached away half of Qualcomm’s best engineers. They’ve already been on a hiring spree and opened a pretty nice office down in San Diego.

yup. Office is literally 5 minutes away from from Qualcomm, so no problems with the commute, and I'm sure they would be willing to pay much more than Qualcomm. Only thing is the patents. Qualcomms real value is in the crazy amount of R&D they do, and the patents they have to show for it.

Broadcom had spent billions as well... and yet their teams were still too small, and not up to the task.

There is more happening in the firmware that you can believe!!

( Disclaimer: I used to work there, could give more details, but NDA )

every now and then i see somebody claiming to know more and hinting at deeper things going on with mobile modems, basebands, gsm.

then they can‘t say anything because of nda. or the gsm standard manual costs hundreds of dollars.

my tin foil hat is glowing, i‘m telling you. we already know that gsm encryption is a joke. i don‘t want to imagine what‘s going on inside all those closed-source baseband firmwares. it creeps me out.

Forgive me if I am wrong but it does look like the stuff Intel would be good at.