LTE or 4G are now well-established as the go-to cellular technology for IoT. LTE Cat 1 is particularly attractive for use cases that benefit from its blend of competitive cost, ubiquitous coverage and adequate performance. Within the LTE family, variants exist that encompass lower end offerings such as LTE-M and niche technology, such as LTE-Advanced. With LTE-M and NB-IoT handling the low power wide area (LPWA) end of the market, there is an enormous middle ground for LTE Cat 1 to serve, along with Cat 4 and other variants.
In addition to this, Cat 1 bis, a single antenna variant of Cat 1, provides compelling performance, efficiency and cost benefits, which are detailed in this paper. Analyst firm Omdia reports that cellular IoT connections will hit 5,4 billion in 2030 with significant growth driven by the introduction of 5G RedCap, Massive IoT (NB-IoT) and LTE Cat 1 bis modules.
The 5G variants are at the very beginning of deployment with low shipment volumes today. These technologies will need time to mature and for adoption to become mainstream.
The current market and the market of 2030 will be dominated by LTE connections. The composition of this is likely to shift towards variants, such as Cat 1 bis, but the bulk of the installed base today remains Cat 1.
Cat 1 has become so pervasive in cellular IoT (see Figure 1) because of the blend of functionality it offers. Introduced as part of 3GPP Release 8 in 2008, the technology was the first LTE variant to be developed for IoT applications. Cat 1 offers typical speeds of 10Mbps downlink and 5Mbps uplink, which is sufficient to support video streaming. In addition, it supports voice, in common with all LTE variants, via voice over LTE.
For latency-sensitive applications, Cat 1 offers latency of 50-100 milliseconds, placing it above Cat M and NB-IoT, but beneath higher LTE categories. Cat 1 is sufficient to support popular IoT activities such as firmware upgrade over-the-air (FOTA) with better capability than LTE-M. Power saving techniques such as power saving mode (PSM) and extended discontinuous reception (eDRX) are also supported.
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Figure 1: Cellular IoT connections by air interface, 2021 to 2030 [Source: Omdia 2024]
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