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Internet of Things "upstart"--Cat.1
According to data, in the Chinese market alone, Cat.1 shipments will reach 110 million in 2021, an increase of more than 5 times compared to 2020. Cat.1 has become the main format of the cellular Internet of Things. This rapidly growing data is not only a replacement for the stock market, but also an expansion of the incremental market.
It is inevitable for 2G/3G to withdraw from the network. This part of the gap is filled by NB-IoT and Cat.1. At the same time, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has also set a goal to make it clear that the future development of the Internet of Things will mainly focus on NB-IoT, 4G (including Cat.1), 5G As the direction, the overall development trend of IoT terminals is to gradually migrate to NB-IoT and Cat.1.
NB-IoT and Cat.1 actually belong to the same category, and they are both types of LTE UE-Category.
In March 2009, 3GPP released the Release 8 version, officially proposed LTE, and simultaneously launched five terminal categories from Cat.1 to Cat.5, which is the birth of Cat.1. Among them, Cat.1 is mainly used in the field of Internet of Things, but it has been tepid for more than ten years. Until 2020, it was suddenly pushed into the spotlight of the Internet of Things stage and finally ushered in its golden age.
With the continuous development of the Release version, 3GPP is also constantly optimizing the types of terminals connected to the Internet of Things, and subsequently launched Cat.M1 (eMTC) and Cat.NB-1 (NB-IoT), giving more possibilities to the Internet of Things.
However, these three "cats" for the Internet of Things have their own specialties. For example, NB-IoT itself has the characteristics of wide coverage, multiple connections, low power consumption and low cost, and is mainly used in urban-level narrowband connection projects; eMTC and The characteristics of NB-IoT are similar, the difference is that the transmission rate is faster than NB-IoT, and it has a certain real-time performance and supports voice. Cat.1 has good mobility, voice call function and high transmission rate, and has more potential in wearable devices, logistics tracking, etc.
According to research data, 60% of the scenarios in the cellular IoT connection distribution require narrowband networks to provide "low-rate" connections, about 10% of the scenarios require "high-rate" connection services, and the remaining 30% of IoT scenarios A "medium rate" connection service is required. While domestic NB-IoT has met the needs of most low-rate scenarios, eMTC has not established a complete ecosystem in China, so trillion-level medium-rate scenarios can only be handed over to Cat.1.