Carriers back LTE TDD for 4G through new initiative

Mobile carriers including China Mobile, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone have launched a new initiative to promote the 4G network innovation LTE (Long Term Evolution, latest standard in the mobile network technology) TDD as a global standard.

LTE TDD, as well known as TD-LTE in China, is one of two LTE variants that both offer higher data speeds than today's 3G networks. With TDD, operators can tune their network to allow more capacity for downloads than for uploads, for instance. In the other variant, FDD, networks typically must allocate the same bandwidth for downloads as for uploads.

China Mobile, the country's largest mobile carrier at 584 million clients, has been the major supporter of TD-LTE. Together, China's government has already begun large-scale trials of the innovation and is researching the development of commercial equipment for TD-LTE networks.

But interest in LTE TDD has been growing among other mobile carriers elsewhere, say analysts and network equipment suppliers. On Wednesday, China's ZTE said it had secured 18 contracts to build trial and commercial LTE TDD networks in Europe, the former Soviet republics and Asia.

The newly announced initiative is meant to develop the "ecosystem" for the LTE TDD innovation and promote it. This could lead to the faster development of lower cost LTE TDD mobile phones, as so then as the fostering of a developer community to build apps and content for such devices, say its promoters.

But its promotion has posed a challenge for China Mobile since the innovation is not used globally. Many of the most popular smartphones just as the iPhone cannot be used on a TD-SCDMA network and instead would have to be redesigned to work on it.

This new initiative, for all that, represents "an important milestone" moving on from the Chinese government and China Mobile deploying LTE TDD innovation, Cheung said: "They're however not just focusing on standards and technologies, nevertheless more on ecosystem development, partnership, public relationship."

The initiative as well seeks to promote the convergence of LTE TDD with LTE FDD. Carriers have expressed interest in using both standards on their 4G networks as a way to maximize their capacity.