According to R&S, it is the first and, to date, the only test and measurement equipment manufacturer to meet the Global Certification Forum (GCF) test platform approval criteria (TPAC). The company offers validated test cases for both types of conformance testing with the R&S TS8980 for RF tests and the R&S TS-RRM for radio resource management (RRM) tests. Additional frequency bands have been verified on the used conformance test systems. At the latest GCF Conformance Agreement Group (CAG) meeting held in Shanghai, work items were activated for certification in five currently introduced LTE bands (1, 3, 7, 20 and 28).
The new LTE UE category Cat-1bis corresponds to category 0 known from machine type communications (MTC), but offers data rates as high as category 1. It is consequently suitable for a variety of applications such as wearables or feature phones.
With an uplink rate of 5 Mbps and a downlink rate of 10 Mbps, this cellular communications technology fills the gap between low-power narrowband IoT and traditional broadband IoT, meeting 80% of today’s IoT application requirements while providing additional solutions for future IoT scenarios.