RedCap UE features — bandwidth, antennas, half-duplex

Bandwidth Reduction — 20 MHz Maximum in FR1

The single largest cost driver in a 5G UE is the RF front-end and baseband processor capacity needed to handle wide bandwidth. RedCap caps UE bandwidth at 20 megahertz in FR1 (sub-6 GHz) and 100 megahertz in FR2 (mmWave). For comparison, a full NR smartphone in FR1 supports up to 100 megahertz, and FR2 smartphones go to 400 megahertz with carrier aggregation. The 5x bandwidth reduction in FR1 lets RedCap chips use simpler analog filtering, lower-rate ADCs, and smaller baseband processors. eRedCap in Rel-18 reduces this further to 5 megahertz for the simplest device profiles.