5G RedCap may stand for 5G reduced capability, but as remarked by Yatin Pahwa, head of IoT product and portfolio management at Vodafone, it still represents pretty capable technology compared to what has gone before.
Speaking during a presentation at the 5G and Beyond event hosted by Mobile Europe, Pahwa noted that reduced capability "is a bit of a contradiction in itself, because it is reduced capability compared to 5G standalone, and its full suite of speeds and capability, but at the same time, compared to existing technologies it is still an improvement in many ways."
For those who need a quick recap on RedCap or 5G New Radio Light, it was introduced with 3GPP Release 17 to address those use cases that fall between high-speed enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and low throughput massive machine-type communication (mMTC) technologies. In other words, it is designed to bridge the gap between conventional 5G and IoT.
As explained by Pahwa, RedCap is designed to "support devices with lower throughput as compared to what it is today." Both RedCap and enhanced RedCap (eRedCap) are ultimately expected to be less costly and less complex compared to other 5G technologies, supporting consumer IoT such as wearables and industrial IoT such as surveillance cameras and robots.
However, although there has been much talk about RedCap, with "pockets of activity" in markets such as China, Pahwa warns that it will be another three to five years before the technology reaches sufficient scale and hits the right price points to become mainstream, for a number of reasons.
More 5G standalone please
For instance, RedCap devices operate on 5G standalone (SA) networks only. And as has been well documented, 5G SA rollout has been slower than expected, although the pace has started to pick up. About 67 5G SA networks had been deployed globally at the end of 2024, according to the January 2025 update from the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA).
"We need to have 5G standalone deployed in networks, and we need to have them deployed on a wider scale, especially when we're handling and working with international customers, and customers that have a multi-country footprint, which also means there needs to be roaming available," Pahwa said.
In addition, there are still a number of technologies that are already supporting IoT use cases, including 2G, low power wide area (LPWA) technologies such as NB-IoT and 4G-based LTE Cat 1 and LTE Cat 4. "We believe that 4G will be around for a long time, and a lot of the use cases that we expect RedCap and enhanced RedCap to address are still going to be addressed through 4G. So it will be a bit of a transition."
Pahwa added: "We know that we can expect RedCap to have more throughput compared to LTE Cat 4. We know it's going to have more latency. We know it will also then support native 5G capabilities, for example, slicing. At the same time, at least for the foreseeable future, it is going to be more costly" than the existing technologies.
In summary, Pahwa said, "we're not in the era of RedCap yet, but I believe it is around the corner, and it is going to be a function of how quickly we can scale, how quickly we have 5G standalone networks rolling out and also then the cost of modules and chipsets and the devices that finally start to support these, which are then reasonably priced."