What‘s the Difference Between LTE Cat 1 and LTE Cat 4?

PublishTime： 2023-09-15 Article Source：usr News

May 7, 2020, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the Notice of the General Office of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on Further Promoting the Comprehensive Development of Mobile Internet of Things. The relevant requirements for the establishment of mobile Internet of Things are clearly put forward. It is necessary to accelerate the migration of 2G/3G Internet of Things services.Establish a comprehensive ecosystem of mobile Internet of Things with coordinated development of NB-IoT, 4G (including LTE cat 1) and 5G. Guide new IoT terminals to migrate to NB-IoT and LTE cat 1.

So what exactly is LTE cat 1? What does it have to do with what we often hear about NB-IoT and eMTC?

What is Cat?

First, let's talk about LTE cat 1.

The full name of Cat is Cat.1 and the full name is LTE UE-Category 1. As the name implies, LTE cat 1 is a standard for the category of user terminals under the 4G communication LTE network. When the 3GPP organization formulates the LTE standard, Cat.1 ~ 20 is used to measure the wireless performance of user terminal equipment, that is, to divide the terminal rate level. Among them, Cat.1 has an uplink peak rate of 5Mbit/s and a downlink peak rate of 10Mbit/s, which is positioned as a category for the Internet of Things application market.

Rate Correspondence Table of Different Category Levels Why is LTE cat 1 "hot"?

Driven by the evolution trend of global mobile Internet of Things technology standards and industrial structure, the advantages of Cat.1 are gradually emerging. The LTE cat 1 chip and module not only have higher maturity and integration, but also have simpler hardware architecture and lower peripheral hardware cost. It can also form scale effect in a short time. In addition, with the accelerated withdrawal of 2G/3G, the three major domestic operators have also begun to actively guide industry users to use Cat.1 terminal modules.Since then, the new "net red" Cat.1 was born.

The application scenarios of the above three rates all have corresponding cellular modules to meet the requirements. So why do we need NB-IOT, LTE cat 1 and eMTC to support it? The main reasons are as follows:

1. 2G/3G has become an inevitable withdrawal from the network in the future. The Internet of Things technology based on 4G/5G (NB-IoT + 4G + 5G NR) will play a major role in opening up the interconnection of all things.

2. NB-IOT can not meet the needs of medium speed and mobile characteristics, the development of eMTC is not satisfactory, and the domestic industrial ecology has not kept up with it. The LTE cat 1 is the best choice.

3. Advantages of LTE cat 1: seamless access to existing 3G/4G networks.

Advantages of LTE cat 4

2G and 3G adopt GSM and WCDMA mobile network technologies with bandwidth of 25MHz respectively. Their main applications include voice calls, short messages, image transmission, GPS and so on. But for wireless broadband LTE cat 4, its data transmission rate is a cross-era progress. Download speeds up to 150Mbps (4G LTE-A up to 1Gbps). After years of change, it has become an outstanding cellular network technology in the world. In order to easily distinguish the core tasks of each generation, it can be assumed that 2G is for voice service, 3G is for image streaming. The LTE cat 4 is for video and more Internet of things applications.

So what makes LTE cat 4 technology grow so fast in just a few years?

Advantage 1: Strong signal transmission capability

Due to the existence of a variety of non-uniform communication technologies under the 3G network, its further development is inevitably limited. Taking this as a lesson, the birth of LTE cat 4 combines the key advantages and network technologies of WiFi and 3G. It has also obtained centralized development investment worldwide. Therefore, the global LTE cat 4 network can be viewed as a cellular network with seamless coverage.

Advantage 2: Super fast transmission speed

Looking at the overall transmission speed of 4G LTE, its network bandwidth can reach 2-8GHz.Category 0-15 also covers multiple levels of maximum uplink and downlink transmission rates. Its increasing connectivity ensures faster and smoother data rates to adapt to various Internet of Things application scenarios.

Advantage 3: High degree of intelligence

Speaking of the highly intelligent attributes of LTE cat 4, its application function performance in independent selection and processing ability is a typical explanation. For example, as one of the most commonly used services, geographic location positioning is supported by 4G communication technology. It can grow into a more accurate and faster positioning device similar to professional navigation equipment, which is convenient and economical.

Lte cat 1 VS Lte cat 4

All of the above clarifies the overwhelming benefits of 4G connectivity in terms of coverage and reliability. Currently, LTE cat 1 and LTE cat 4 technologies are becoming particularly important in cellular wireless communication applications. So what should be considered when choosing LTE cat 1 or LTE cat 4 to match the needs of different applications?

The LTE cat 4 was first announced in 3GPP Release 8 in 2009 and the LTE cat 1 was first released in 3GPP Release 13.

Features of LTE cat 1:

With 10Mbit/s downlink speed and 5Mbit/s uplink speed and low power consumption, it is very suitable for M2M applications of medium rate LPWR.

It has a lower cost per module due to its slower data speed and lower recurring network costs, because it connects seamlessly to existing LTE cat 4 networks without the need for additional software and hardware networking. Also because there is no additional investment in deployment, the cost of full network coverage for operators will be very low. In general, the LTE cat 1 module is half the price of the LTE cat 4 module, making it an attractive low-cost option.

lte cat Module 1 is a wearable device, shared payment, water control, charging station and intelligent agriculture with certain requirements for power consumption and data transmission stability, smart home appliances, logistics tracking and so on.

Features of LTE cat 4:

The LTE cat 4 supports high-speed data transmission with a maximum downlink rate of 150Mbps and a maximum uplink rate of 50Mbps.

The unit cost of LTE cat 4 is higher, because the increase in the standard per unit data rate requires a higher price and configuration of the main chip and other components to support.

Higher speed LTE cat 4 is suitable for media live and streaming media, video surveillance and security, car networking, broadband access, 4G wireless routing, wireless commercial display equipment scenarios that are weakly sensitive to cost and power consumption.

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