At the Mobile World Congress 2018 (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain, Quectel Wireless Solutions, the leading global supplier of wireless modules and solutions, shared its plan for high-rate cellular IoT market that it will launch more LTE-Advanced modules in the coming year.
Currently, Quectel is offering three LTE Cat 6 modules in different form factors, which are EG06 in LGA form factor, EM06 in M.2 form factor and EP06 in Mini PCIe form factor, respectively.
Adopting the 3GPP Rel. 12 LTE technology, all the three products deliver M2M-optimized speeds of 300Mbps downlink and 50Mbps uplink peak data rates, and can be ideally employed in IoT segments requesting mass data transmission such as gateway, video monitoring and digital signage.
“The potential of high-rate IoT market is quite huge. Quectel will continue to invest in the LTE-A sector in the future,” said Doron Zhang, Senior VP of Quectel.
“This year, Quectel plans to launch a Cat 12 module based on the latest LTE-Advanced Pro technology. It will support up to 600Mbps downlink data rate, cover major global bands and support global roaming.”
Doron added that Cat 16 module is also included in Quectel’s LTE-A product roadmap, which is expected to provide 1Gbps peak data rate connectivity. The Cat 12 and Cat 16 modules will be compatible with existing Cat 6 modules, making sure that customers can migrate between different categories in the future.
In the past year, global 4G LTE coverage saw great improvements with more than 200 operators having deployed Cat 6 networks. The wide LTE network coverage and fast connectivity guarantees that IoT devices can connect in many countries even in some remote areas.
Gartner predicts that by 2020, the number of global connected devices will reach 26 billion with the market expanding to 1.9 billion U.S. dollars.
For the forthcoming 5G, Doron told that Quectel is now in full gear preparing relevant technologies, and has been keeping close contact with mainstream carriers and chipmakers. “It will take some time before the extensive deployment of 5G. Once the network and chipset is ready, we will offer 5G module as early,” according to Doron.
