SK Telecom has completed the deployment of LTE Cat-M1 technology for IoT applications on commercial LTE base stations in collaboration with Ericsson and Qualcomm. LTE Cat-M1 is expected to lower manufacturing costs of IoT devices as its communications modules are much cost-effective than their counterparts for LTE-M, bringing more companies into an ecosystem for IoT business.

Earlier this year, SK Telecom has completed a trial of the LTE Cat-M1 deployment on its test network at the Network IT Convergence R&D Center located in Bundang, Korea. Following the success of the trial, in August this year, it began the nation’s first deployment of Cat-M1 at commercial LTE base stations for field tests.

LTE Cat-M1 is one of the standards published in March 2016 by 3GPP, an international collaboration to develop global mobile communications specifications, supporting data rates up to 1 Mbps. It is an upgraded version of the existing LTE-M technology, designed to deliver high volume data generated from IoT devices. The newest version is expected to help a broad use of IoT applications which require the transmission of mid- and high-volume data, such as voice and photo.

SK Telecom currently delivers lower-power, lower-volume data transmission on LoRa networks, while dedicating LTE-M network to high-volume data transmission for its IoT services. The deployment of LTE Cat-M1 will help it to upgrade all its LTE-M network operations to a higher level.

SK Telecom also successfully linked the LTE Cat-M1 network with its commercial LoRa networks. The link will help in identifying data generated from IoT devices and control them at a single server to allocate relatively high-volume data to the LTE Cat-M1 network and low-volume data to the LoRa network.