China Mobile has announced initiatives with vendors aimed at accelerating deployment of TD-LTE and laying the groundwork for voice over the 4G standard.
The operator and Alcatel-Lucent last night used Mobile World Congress to launch lightRadio Metro Radio, a small cell based system jointly developed by the companies.
The units are designed for deployment in busy indoor and outdoor locations such as shopping malls or stadiums.
lightRadio Metro Radio was born out of a TD-LTE co-creation agreement signed by China Mobile and Alcatel-Lucent in January 2012.
The new system will likely be deployed in China Mobile's trial TD-LTE network, which currently spans 13 cities in China including Shanghai, Nanjing and Qingdao.
Separately, China Mobile and Ericsson announced they had completed the first demonstration of a dual mode HD VoLTE call between TD-LTE and FDD LTE.
The trial used network gear from Ericsson, a multimode modem from ST-Ericsson and quad-core chipsets from Renesas Mobile.
The companies said the demonstration is a key step towards the commercial launch of VoLTE over TD-LTE.
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