China Mobile appeared to have played a blinder when it succeeded in getting the government to assign TD-LTE spectrum to all three Chinese cellcos, before the more common FDD frequencies. But the headstart it secured may be far shorter than it had hoped, with the government reported to be ready to award FD-LTE licences this month. The awards of TDD licences first gave Mobile, which already had huge TD-LTE trial networks in place, a major lead over its two rivals, which had hoped to build out 4G in paired FDD spectrum, as they did in 3G. Those operators, China Unicom and China Telecom, were faced with the choice of adopting a hybrid TDD/FDD strategy, or falling behind in the 4G…