my country is constantly building 5G base stations. The establishment of 5G base stations means that my country’s communications industry has taken a big step forward. Many users will inevitably think that the 2G network can be withdrawn after seeing these data, because we have a mature 4G network. And continue to improve and innovate 5G networks. What about the facts? it's not true.
In many IoT scenarios, we will use information collection and data return. For example, during the transportation of trucks, containers need to return data such as temperature, humidity, and location in real time. If we use 4G or 5G networks, there will be big problems.
First, the tariff cost is very high. Because the amount of data returned is very small, the traffic cost of using the 4G/5G network will be very high, and it is not cost-effective to use.
Secondly, the 4G/5G module has high power consumption. To know many application scenarios of the Internet of Things, we all use batteries to supply power, but the battery power is limited. If GSM is used, the power consumption can be very low, and it may be able to support us for 4000-5000 times. Information collection and return, but with 5G, there may be only 1,000 times, which is not suitable for such a scenario.
There is also the hardware cost. The price of GMS modules is already very cheap, but the cost of 4G/5G hardware modules is still relatively high.
At the beginning of 2020, some domestic manufacturers have released the latest 4G CAT.1 chips.
The full name of Cat.1 is LTE UE-Category 1. As the name implies, Cat.1 is a standard for user terminal categories under 4G communication LTE networks. According to the introduction of Xian Miao, Vice President of Industrial Internet of Things at Unigroup Zhanrui, when the 3GPP organization formulates LTE standards, Cat.1-20 is used to measure the wireless performance of user terminal equipment, that is, to classify terminal speed levels. Among them, Cat.1 has an uplink peak rate of 5Mbit/s and a downlink peak rate of 10Mbit/s. It is positioned as a category facing the IoT application market.
In fact, in the early stage of LTE development, Cat.1 was not highly concerned by the industry. The reason for the recent popularity is that it has a major relationship with the withdrawal of 2G. According to industry insiders, the conditions for withdrawal of my country's mobile communications 2G and 3G networks have gradually matured. Globally, due to the popularization of 4G and 5G networks, more than 100 operating companies have implemented 2G and 3G withdrawals.
In my country, with the rapid advancement of 5G construction, the exit of 2G and 3G from the stage is also a general trend. The question is who will fill the vacancy left by the withdrawal of the 2G network. Previously, the domestic market had pushed NB-IoT. In recent years, NB-IoT modules have indeed been widely used, and have played an important role in static and active reporting scenarios such as smart water, electricity and gas meters. However, the 2G network also involves many real-time, mobility, bandwidth transmission capabilities, and even application scenarios that support voice communication capabilities, such as in-vehicle, mobile payment, industrial interconnection, and elderly phones. This is something that NB-IoT, whose uplink and downlink rates are only 100Kbps, cannot meet. Therefore, Cat 1, which also faces the IoT market, stands out.
The M601 module is a brand new CAT1 module, deeply integrated with the Alibaba Cloud Internet of Things platform, and provides a variety of cases for use (Bluetooth gateway, JT808 protocol, smart tracker, etc.).