B20 (800 MHz)

The 3GPP B20 (800 MHz) LTE band is the second most popular band used by public mobile operators for LTE network deployments, and is excellent for wide area coverage in regional and rural environments, for in-building coverage, and represent an important digital dividend arising from the shift by TV broadcasters to digital transmissions.

The reverse duplex in LTE Band 20 is a result of balancing the requirements of new LTE services with the interference concerns related to existing DTT services in adjacent frequencies. This arrangement ensured that the introduction of LTE in the 800 MHz band did not disrupt existing services.

800 MHz spectrum has helped several operators to launch LTE services faster and meet market, investor or regulatory coverage requirements. For many operators using the B20 band enabled nationwide or near-national coverage to be achieved in the shortest possible time.

Mobile operators have flexibility to deploy LTE using band 20 as a single band or as part of a multi-band network. LTE-A or LTE-Advanced Pro technologies can be deployed using carrier aggregation to combine various bandwidths of band 20 with other carriers.

B20 (800 MHz) has also been an extremely popular choice for LTE-MLTE-M: LTE-M is a type of LTE network published by 3GPP in Releases 13 to 15 specifications. LTE-M is a low power wide area technology which supports IoT through lower device complexity and provides extended coverage, leveraging a mobile operator's existing LTE base stations. LTE-M finds its…, and NB-IoTNB-IoT: Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) is a 3GPP Release 13 feature that reuses various principles and building blocks of the LTE physical layer and higher protocol layers and defines a new Cat-NB1 UE. The standard leverages a mobile operator's existing LTE base stations permitting rapid time-to… (LTE Cat NB1/NB2) due to the deep penetration and wide coverage characteristics exhibited by the 800 MHz band. Due to its large wavelength, B20 does not easily support Massive MIMOMassive MIMO: A wireless communication architecture that uses a large number of antennas (often denoted as 'massive' due to the scale, typically in the order of tens or even hundreds) at the transmitter and receiver to facilitate multiple simultaneous data streams. Massive MIMO uses techniques like beamforming,… and beamforming technologies.