Sunday 18 November 2012

Category 4 LTE UEs in the market


It is interesting to see that the first category 4 LTE UEs are appearing in the market. Up to now the vast majority (if not all) of LTE devices have been category 3. The device in question is Huawei's E3276 USB dongle. Category 4 LTE UEs can reach theoretical physical layer DL throughputs of up to 150Mbps. The uplink throughput stays the same at 50Mbps.

The E3276 is also LTE penta-band capable (LTE FDD 800/900/1800/2100/2600) which means that it will operate in pretty much every country that has launched LTE.

The complete 3GPP release 8 LTE UE category table can be seen below.

Moving to the next category, 5,  is not going to be that easy as it requires 4x4 MIMO in the DL. This will mean operators will need to deploy an additional 2 antennas on the base station and UE vendors will need to squeeze another 2 antennas in the device. Possible on a tablet but anything smaller is going to be a challenge. In case you are wondering the increase in the uplink performance of a category 5 device is due to the use of 64QAM as opposed to 16QAM.
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1 comment:

  1. Anonymous28 November 2012 at 01:45

    there is a custom add on Smartphone antenna that enable 2T2R on the Phone Casing instead of in-built into the phone internal antenna. It was developed by Antenova A10453, so far just a prototype.

    Interesting development to increase smartphone antenna quantity and its gain to fully exploit LTE 4*4 MIMO.

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