WindSail IoT Consulting

The cellular world continues to evolve, with major inflections occurring every 10 or so years, and with smaller technology advancements coming at more frequent intervals. All of these events come with significant time to rolls out in the cellular industries, due to their development, testing and certification approval cycles.

This is the case with one of the latest 4G cellular category variants to come out, called Cat-1bis. This new variant of the super popular CAT-1 protocol added the suffix “bis”, which comes from the Latin, meaning “second time around”.

But CAT-1bis does have some limitation.

If you are looking for the absolute lowest power, and bandwidth is not an issue, then Cat-M1 is the best way to go. Sony’s Altair Chipset division captures this pretty well in this graphic. However, note, PSM and eDRX low power modes are not trivial, and require support from your MNO/MVNO.

And if product lifetime and longevity is concern, then it’s time to start thinking 5-10 years out. Again, Altair does a good job of depicting how the cellular world is going to change at the end of this decade. That’s because major US operators will being to “sunset” the 4G/LTE technologies, forcing their customer base to 5G technologies like RedCap.