Announcing its financial results on Wednesday, China Telecom also revealed that it favors FDD technology for its future LTE network.
Chariman and CEO Wang Xiaochu declined to comment when the Chinese government would issue the licenses for commercial 4G services, but said China Telecom would prefer to choose wider deployed FDD-LTE technology over TD-LTE for 4G.
“The investment cost on TD-LTE is much higher than that on FDD-LTE,” he said.
Wang said China Telecom intends to rent the TD-LTE network from China Mobile if the company were asked to deploy the Beijing-backed 4G technology.
“We’ve been discussing with the regulator about this [renting TD-LTE from China Mobile] but it’s still in early stage,” he noted.
His comment threw cold water on market expectations that China’s three major carriers will all deploy the TD-LTE technology.
To accelerate the commercialization of TD-LTE, the Ministry of Industry and Information announced earlier this year that it has set aside a bulk of 190MHz spectrum on the 2500MHz-2690MHz frequency band for TD-LTE deployment. This led to wide speculations that both China Unicom and China Telecom will also operate 4G service on TD-LTE technology.
China Mobile announced earlier this week that it would pour 41.5 billion yuan on building “commercial-ready” TD-LTE networks, as the company prepares for the rollout of the 4G services.
Wang said China Telecom plans to focus on deploying LTE to major cities first once it starts rolling out its network.