The headline difference between LTE and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) is the data rate. LTE, with its near-ubiquitous global coverage, offers a peak data rate of 300Mbps while LTE-Advanced, if it utilizes everything in the LTE-A armoury including carrier aggregation, 4×4 MIMO, and 256QAM modulation in the downlink, can deliver downlink speeds of up to around 1Gbps. LTE-Advanced Pro – sometimes called 4.9G – can increase bandwidth even further.

Quectel’s own research has found that, in optimal situations, LTE-A networks can deliver speeds of up to 2Gbps – that’s 14-times faster than LTE Cat 4. That may be at the outer edges of current capabilities, but LTE-A isn’t a bleeding edge technology awaiting adoption. LTE-A is a well-established technology, having been first deployed in South Korea in 2013.

Countries and territories with launched LTE-A networks (Source: GSA, May 2025)

Industry organization GSA reports that 346 LTE-A networks have been launched in 156 countries and territories as of May 2025 and 374 operators are investing in the technology in 161 countries and territories. There is a substantial LTE-A footprint already so IoT developers can be confident in finding network support for their devices in most areas they operate. In addition, GSA has identified 218 operators investing in one or more LTE-Advanced Pro technologies.

LTE vs LTE-A: aggregation, antennas and amplitude modulation

A key difference between LTE and LTE-A is carrier aggregation, a technique that enables total bandwidth to be increased by combining multiple channels to support aggregation of up to five carriers. A further difference is that LTE-A utilizes a greater number of antenna elements, employing multiple input multiple output (MIMO) technology for spatial multiplexing to improve data rates and signal quality. Finally, LTE-A uses 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) to generate significantly higher bit rates per symbol than standard LTE.

For latency sensitive use cases, LTE-A also offers improvements over standard LTE. LTE-A deployments have achieved latency as low as 10-20ms in optimal conditions while LTE is in the 20-50ms range.

This performance, however, comes at a cost. Typically, LTE-A modules are more expensive and there are costs associated with the more complex radio frequency design of LTE-A, including 4×4 and 8×8 MIMO solutions. Even so, with 5G infrastructure still being rolled out, LTE-A provides a significant step up in performance over LTE while offering a cheaper overall solution than 5G.

5G itself is becoming more and more widely available but LTE-A continues to boast wide applicability, occupying a market sweet spot offering significantly greater capacity and lower latency in comparison to LTE while avoiding the additional costs and complexity, plus the coverage gaps, of 5G. This explains why the technology is being adopted across a wide range of devices and industries.

Popular use cases include consumer laptops, industrial PDAs, customer premise equipment, digital signage, home gateways, industrial routers, smart safety devices, set top boxes and wireless point of sale devices to name just a few. Ultimately, LTE-A should be selected by designers with use cases that need greater speed and lower latency than LTE can offer but don’t need the extra performance of 5G. That also includes use cases that depend on comprehensive coverage which counts out 5G or those that have cost constraints that 5G can’t accommodate.

LTE-A is far from a niche offering and it can easily be argued that, today, it meets the needs of many latency and speed sensitive applications more comprehensively than 5G.

To learn more about Quectel’s LTE-A IoT products and services, visit here.