contracts are made. However, if a utility company for their metering solution only equips the modems with 2G or 3G technology, one ends up being forced to commit in maintaining the 2G or 3G network for such a devices for next 10-15 years. If after next 5 years only MTC devices remain in the network, then the revenue may not be enough anymore to justify the maintenance cost for a 2G or 3G network of all the other traffic have move to 4G by then (or even getting started with 5G as discussed in Chapter 17). The 3GPP conducted a study for LTE Release 12, with the results captured in [1], which concluded that making some simplifications, such as lower peak data rate and single RX chain the UE cost could be reduced. For Release 12, a new UE category was introduced which support only single antenna reception and reduced peak data rates of up to 1 Mbps. The new UE category is shown in Table 3.1 in comparison with category 1 and category 4, with the categories 3 and 4 being the current widely implemented UE categories, with the wider coverage of Release 8 UE categories provided in Chapter 2. As can be seen from Table 3.1, the data rate capability of the category 0 UE is quite limited, offering only 1 Mbps peak data rate both in the uplink and downlink directions. This limitation is intended to ensure that this category would not be used for regular end user devices, such as low cost 4G-enabled tablets, since the maximum data rate of only 1 Mbps, clearly below of the low cost 3G-enabled chip sets. This was important for especially such markets where the operators are not able to control (at least not fully) what kinds of devices are introduced to their network. For example, a low cost 4G-enabled tablet would be otherwise tempted to operate with single receiver antenna if it could achieve also higher LTE data rates with such an implementation. Table 3.1 Category 0 added in Release 12 Rel-8 Cat-4 Rel-8 Cat-1 Rel-12 Cat-0 Downlink peak rate (Mbps) Uplink peak rate (Mbps) Max number of receiver antennas Duplex mode Full duplex