India’s transport and infrastructure network gives Qualcomm an important opening to build vehicle-to-everything (V2X) safety technology directly into new roads, according to a senior company executive, as the chipmaker pushes to diversify beyond its traditional smartphone business.
“The cost of making highways capable of V2X is not very high. One can deploy the same technology in streetlight and other road infrastructure, etc. So making it available, especially for new highways that are getting deployed, is very straightforward,” Nakul Duggal, Qualcomm’s Group General Manager for Automotive, Industrial & Embedded IoT said in an interaction with Fe. He added the incremental cost is low because streetlights and other roadside infrastructure can carry the same connectivity already being added to new vehicles for over-the-air software updates.
V2X relies on the 5.9 GHz spectrum band, which is under contention on whether it should be kept open to encourage broader participation or be licensed to telecom operators. Qualcomm said that it has invested in the technology for years, betting that non-line-of-sight safety systems have an edge over cameras or radar alone. The company is pursuing three variants- vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure and vehicle-to-smartphone, with the latter one aimed at alerting drivers to pedestrians and cyclists, mainly near intersections, which Duggal said is a major site of traffic fatalities alongside high-speed blind spots.
Meanwhile, TRAI had recently released a consultation paper putting in place a framework before deployments scale with the idea of avoiding fragmented standards and ensuring systems work across vehicles, cities and networks.
Duggal said that that the rollout’s pace depends on regulatory decisions, including how spectrum for the technology is allocated and whether it is treated as dedicated safety spectrum or shared, unlicensed capacity.
According to analysts, qualcomm seeks to reduce its reliance on smartphones by expanding into automotive, industrial IoT alongside physical AI. While Duggal pushed back on the idea that qualcomm’s market position is eroding on the handset business, he attributed the recent softness to rising memory costs rather than lost share. He said the shift toward agentic AI, in which users converse with a device rather than navigate apps, is expanding both the size of the smartphone market and the silicon content per device. He added that surging memory prices are hitting mid-market and entry-level handsets hardest, since memory accounts for a larger share of costs at that end of the market.