Vietnam has become a big deal for Qualcomm in 5G RAN (2025)

Vietnam is today seen by US authorities as one of the worst trade villains ever, selling mountains of cheaply manufactured trainers and other goods to Americans without buying the same volume of American products in return. Trump's fair-trade formula – which divides America's trade deficit with a country by its imports from that country and then halves the figure – explains why Vietnam was hit last week with a tariff of 46%. Too puny to retaliate, it is instead trying to placate the bully.

[Editor's note: Per Dear Donald's latest proclamation, Vietnam may have 90 days – or longer, who knows? – to chart a path around the Trump tax.]

Healthy relations between the US and Vietnam matter to a small part of Qualcomm. Known primarily for its role in designing and developing smartphone modems, the US company has for several years been trying to establish itself as a maker of chips for the radio access network (RAN). Today, that business is dominated by Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia, along with a few of their silicon partners. But an important deal with Viettel, which operates Vietnam's biggest mobile telecom network, is a sign of Qualcomm's intent.

The deal was announced in late 2024, as the vendors securing 5G contracts with Viettel boasted about their wins. Across a 5G RAN ultimately expected to comprise between 50,000 and 100,000 sites, Ericsson and Nokia appear to have landed about two thirds of the work, with Ericsson insisting it was awarded the "majority share of Viettel's nationwide 5G deployment." The remaining third, on the hardware side, is all about Qualcomm.

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The planned 5G rollout across that part of Viettel's footprint is notable for a few reasons. It is, first, a rare although not unique example of a telco developing its own network technology. While Qualcomm is stumping up silicon and code for RAN equipment, much of the software that powers the network comes directly from Viettel through a division called Viettel High Tech (VHT). "They have in-house development and an extremely good team of hungry engineers," said Gerardo Giaretta, the general manager of Qualcomm's 5G infrastructure business.

Chip wars

That Viettel code replaces what an operator would normally take from Ericsson or Nokia for key parts of the RAN software stack, hosted on servers referred to as central units and distributed units. This leaves Qualcomm to provide the silicon and software for especially time-sensitive and resource-hungry functions, the Layer 1 slice of this RAN stack. Qualcomm delivers those on a card, branded the X100, that can be connected to any standard server.

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All this also seems to mark out the Viettel project as the world's biggest deployment of "inline" accelerator technology so far. RAN operators taking advantage of general-purpose silicon and widely used IT platforms have three broad options. The purest example of such virtualization is to turn all the network functions into software that can run on a general-purpose central processing unit (CPU), typically made by Intel. The alternatives rely on custom hardware, called accelerators, to provide a boost for those hungrier Layer 1 functions. They can be grouped in two broad categories, of which inline is one. The other is generally known as "lookaside."

Backed heavily by Ericsson and Intel, lookaside entrusts nearly all the Layer 1 functions to the CPU, leaving only forward error correction, an especially demanding task, to the accelerator. But the inline accelerators developed by Qualcomm and Marvell Technology, whose silicon is used in Nokia's 5G products, support the whole of Layer 1. In these deployments, the CPU plays no role in that part of the RAN.

This has led to charges, often from the lookaside camp, that inline stops well short of full RAN virtualization by continuing to lean on custom hardware for Layer 1, a big chunk of the stack. But Giaretta is dismissive. "Even if it is an inline accelerator, all of it is cloud-native, meaning all of our drivers are containerized," he said. Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM-owned Red Hat have shown they can support X100 on their cloud platforms, proving critics are wrong, as far as Qualcomm is concerned.

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Much harder to criticize is the claim about Viettel's deployment being the biggest in the world. Equipment is to be installed at thousands of sites this year and Viettel is due to have more than 10,000 in operation next year, according to Giaretta, who says an X100 card will feature at every one of those sites. Outside Vietnam, nearly all virtual RAN deployments so far are based on Intel's lookaside approach.

Radio smarts

Qualcomm also claims to contribute more to RAN compute than other chipmaking specialists active in Layer 1. Marvell, for instance, brings silicon and related expertise that Nokia fuses with its RAN software. By contrast, Qualcomm can draw on its 40-year history in the wireless communications market to offer the complete product, according to Giaretta. "We provide a commercial Layer 1, which is a little bit of a differentiator for us compared with other silicon vendors, because they don't have the capability," he explained. The Layer 1 is also open to customers for adaptation and changes, Qualcomm insists. "It gives them the possibility of adding their own secret sauce," said Giaretta.

Unlike Marvell or Intel, Qualcomm provides critical silicon for radio units, too. Its QRU chip handles beamforming, which focuses wireless signals like lasers on specific targets. It also looks after other bits of Layer 1 hosted in radio units, such as the digital front end (DFE), responsible for some of the signal processing. The rest of the DFE is managed by a radiofrequency integrated circuit, or transceiver, dubbed QTR. In Viettel's network, these silicon products will feature in radio units designed to support massive MIMO, an antenna-rich 5G technology. Each unit comes with 32 transmitters and 32 receivers.

Viettel is marketing its Qualcomm-led 5G rollout as an example of open RAN, whereby different vendors are paired at the same mobile site. But the massive MIMO setup makes the Vietnamese operator look heavily reliant on Qualcomm for both distributed unit and radio unit technologies. Using an alternative supplier for either of them is possible, says Giaretta. While the Viettel project appears more single vendor in nature, Qualcomm is separately working inside OREX, an offshoot of Japan's Docomo, to show that its X100 accelerator is compatible with a radio unit from NEC that is not based on QRU.

If all goes well, Vietnam could be a 5G launchpad for Qualcomm. Besides operating a big mobile network there, Viettel has an international footprint that includes countries such as Cambodia, Myanmar and even Peru. None of its properties has made significant progress in 5G, either. They represent a juicier opportunity than Qualcomm would probably find in Europe and North America, where telcos have already chosen vendors and extensively built out 5G. Any tariffs that wallop those economies seem unlikely to get a thumbs-up from Qualcomm.