The junior LTE standard, TD-LTE, has been in the spotlight at this week\'s GSMA Mobile Asia Congress, with Softbank and China Mobile outlining their plans.

The Japanese cellco acquired TDD spectrum when it took over the 2.6GHz licenses held by ailing Willcom, the operator of the country\'s ageing PHS mobile services. The spectrum was originally to have been used for a PHS upgrade called XPG, but Softbank will instead use the fairly similar TD-LTE standard, while ensuring compatibility for the legacy users.

Tetsuzo Matsumoto, a board member at the operator, told the conference that Softbank would become one of the world\'s first commercial TD-LTE carriers when it goes live as early as next March. It would join smaller early adopters in Saudi Arabia and Poland, while China Mobile, Clearwire and India\'s Reliance Infotel are the biggest names expected to roll out the systems from 2012 onwards.

Matsumoto said that Softbank is looking to deploy around 12,000 base stations covering 92 percent of the population of Japan next year. As China Mobile knows, the biggest drawback of the TDD flavour is a lack of handset ecosystem - the Chinese giant has been calling on silicon providers to support both LTE modes by default, and has been in talks with a range of potential smartphone providers, including Apple. Initially, though, Softbank will be confined to data cards, dongles and personal routers, but hopes to have its first smartphone by the "summer or autumn". This would also support its other networks, which run HSPA and FD-LTE.

Meanwhile, China Mobile itself boasted of "substantial progress" with TD-LTE at the same event, despite uncertainty over when the Chinese authorities will green light the new networks and spectrum bands. EVP Li Zhengmao said: "This year, we witnessed the rapid development of global LTE commercialization, as the scarcity of spectrum resources has become an increasingly prominent issue."

China Mobile has conducted a pilot of TD-LTE technology running on 850 base stations in six cities in phase one and working with seven infrastructure suppliers and many terminal and chipset vendors. This was completed in September 2011 and followed the operation of a showcase network at last year\'s Shanghai World Expo. The second phase of the pilot will run from late 2011 to next July. In phase one, key performance metrics were evaluated, including user data rates, cell throughput and latency. The cellco said most of these were in line with expectations, and that three of its infrastructure partners could already support more than 200 users at once.

 Stage two will include a "demonstration and experience" network in Beijing, to show off TD-LTE to customers and partners. And Mobile has also agreed to run the Smart Shenzhen broadband wireless city project, which will use TD-LTE for services such as healthcare, education, government and intelligent traffic.