---TD-LTE Entering Global Scale Deployment New Era

Mr. Xi Guohua, China Mobile’s Chairman announced the latest plan for TD-LTE commercial services in the year of 2014 during China Mobile Global Partner Conference 2013 on Dec. 18th, which sets target at 500,000 base-station covering 340 major cities and 100,000,000 TD-LTE device sales in 2014, just two weeks after the official issue of China 4G TD-LTE licenses to 3 domestic operators. While, in United States, Sprint recently announced its ‘Spark’ plan with 38,000 TD-LTE base stations deployment and 250 million population coverage nationwide in 2014. And in Japan, Softbank has owned over 2 million TD-LTE subscribers, and planning to expand its network to reach 54,000 TD-LTE base stations in 2014. In addition, by the end of November 2013, 25 TD-LTE networks have been commercially launched and over 40 operators have announced their commercial plan. With the repaid development in above markets, global TD-LTE scale commercial deployment has been on track.

As the chairman of GTI, Mr. Craig Ehrlich indicated: ‘TD-LTE, as a global standard which is formed in 3GPP and jointly promoted by global industry, has achieved synchronized and converged development with LTE FDD in standard, product, ecosystem and network operation. More important, the converged deployment and operation of LTE TDD/FDD is the only evolution path for the next generation mobile communication and will definitely be adopted globally. It is also worth to mention that, recently some Tier 1 terminal manufacturers like Apple and Samsung have delivered multi-mode multi-band smart terminals with global roaming capability, which effectively boosted global LTE TDD/FDD deployments’.

He also pointed that: ‘2014 will be a crucial year for TD-LTE global scale development. It is estimated that TD-LTE base station will exceed 700,000, and cover 3 billion populations by the end of 2014. Look into the future, GTI would like to work closely with global industry partners to further promote the development of information society and change our daily lives’.

GTI is a virtual open platform founded in February 2011 by global operators including Bharti Airtel, China Mobile, Clearwire, Softbank and Vodafone. By now, 85 operators and 65 industry partners have joined GTI to promote TD-LTE global scale commercialization and converged development with LTE FDD.