India, Oct. 20 -- Qualcomm on Tuesday announced it would enter a new business area: selling chipsets for macro cell towers.

The move will position Qualcomm against other silicon vendors for macro cell towers, including Marvell, Broadcom, Intel and Xilinx. And analysts believe that Qualcom's move could help further accelerate the open RAN trend by creating more silicon options for open RAN equipment vendors.

"It's impressive that Qualcomm is now leaning into RAN [radio access network] infrastructure and it will result in increasing its 5G reach and sales opportunities beyond end devices [like smartphones]," said Will Townsend, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy.

"It is big news," agreed Heavy Reading Principal Analyst Gabriel Brow...