The mobile industry has thrown its full weight behind China Mobile’s TD-LTE plans, with vendors committed to including both TD and FD LTE chips in products.
China Mobile chief Wang Jianzhou said yesterday he was “delighted” at the level of industry support for TD-LTE, the 4G version of China’s TD-SCDMA technology.
In a conference keynote he said China Mobile need products containing both TD-LTE and FD-LTE - the W-CDMA 4G evolution - to allow customers to roam.
Wang observed that TD-LTE had the backing of GSMA and the 3GPP and vendors across the board. “Yesterday I met with many vendors, including chipset manufacturers, and all of them agreed to promote the LTE chipset with both TD and FD from the very beginning,” he said.
Since China Mobile had confirmed TD-LTE as an evolution from TD-SCDMA, all TD-SCDMA manufacturers had ensured their -SCDMA equipment would support a migration, Wang said.
He predicted China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA service would attract 3 million customers by year-end, but said it needed many more low-end handsets at a target price of around 1000 yuan ($146).
In other TD-LTE news, China Mobile and Huawei conducted a TD-LTE field trial on the show premises yesterday, while the carrier teamed with Nokia Siemens to demo TD-LTE femtocells.
Alcatel-Lucent and Motorola both said they had been selected to take part in China Mobile’s TD-LTE trial system at the World Expo next year.