LTE is a standard for wireless communication and LTE Advanced / LTE Advanced Pro (Cat 6 to Cat 19) is a high-speed version of LTE, sometimes marketed as LTE+, 4G+, 4GX,4.5G or 4G LTE Ultra. LTE support varies from country to country, and the speed may vary depending on user location and how fast they’re traveling.
LTE (Cat 1~5)
- LTE has been introduced in 2012 in order to provide high data rate mobile broadband connection.
- It has been introduced to provide 10 times faster data rate compared to 3G.
- LTE provides 100 Mbps.
- LTE has been specified in 3GPP Rel.8.
- LTE supports carrier bandwidth of 20 MHz.
LTE Advanced (Cat 6~16)
- LTE Advanced is an enhancement to LTE with data rate increase to the factor of 10.
- It supports carrier aggregation and higher order MIMO techniques.
- It supports the data rate of 1 Gbps in downlink (From eNB to UE) and 500 Mbps in uplink direction (From UE to eNB).
LTE Advanced Pro (Cat 17~19)
- It is enhanced version of LTE Advanced to support higher data rate beyond 3 Gbps.
- It supports increased Bandwidth, increased efficiency and improved latency.
- It makes use of both licensed (400 MHz to 3.8 GHz) and unlicensed (5GHz) spectrum to support up to 32 carriers of 20MHz each.
- It is backward compatible with existing LTE and LTE Advanced devices.
- It makes use of spectrum more efficiently by increasing number of antenna paths as well as multi beam approach. It serves single radio cell with 16 to 64 antenna paths.
- It grows network capacity to about 200% without any additional spectrum or base stations.
- Increased battery life about 10 times than LTE.