It now seems highly likely that the Chinese regulator will award commercial licences for TD-LTE before year end, rather than delaying until 2014 or beyond, so China Mobile is gearing up to convert its huge trial networks to full operations as quickly as possible, building on its 4G headstart over its rivals, and compensating for the inadequacies of its 3G platform.
The largest Chinese provider has launched its biggest tender to date for TD-LTE equipment, according to China Daily, and plans to buy 207,000 base stations and associated gear to deploy in 31 provinces. The operator plans to increase its capex spend by almost 50% this year, compared to 2012, partly because of the acceleration of its 4G program. It will spend CNY190.2bn ($30.5bn) this year, with CNY42bn (more than half of its network infrastructure spend) going on LTE.
Ericsson has already said it is confident it will gain a larger share of Mobile’s contracts this time around than in previous rounds, although local analysts estimate local majors Huawei and ZTE will scoop up at least half the winnings. To date, Alcatel-Lucent has been the most successful non-Chinese vendor, with about 14.5% of the first round tender last year.
All the suppliers will be polishing up their TD-LTE offerings to attract Mobile’s attention, including Nokia Siemens, which claimed this week that it had broken the record for TD-LTE upload speed, reaching 56Mbps on a commercial base station by deploying MIMO and a single 20MHz carrier. The throughput speed was recording on a test network in Hangzhou, China, running NSN’s Flexi Multiradio 10 Base Station with Single User-MIMO technology. Last year, NSN pushed uplink speed beyond even TD-LTE-Advanced specifications using the same base station with Multiuser MIMO.
‘Today’s download speeds will be tomorrow’s upload speeds.” said Tero Peltola, VP of LTE at the vendor.
These suppliers will be hoping that the other Chinese carriers also warm to TD-LTE in the short term. It is widely expected that the government will award TDD spectrum to all three players, while delaying new FDD spectrum allocations for two years or more. That will disadvantage China Unicom and China Telecom, which would prefer to stick to FDD technologies for now, and have more time to get returns on their 3G investments ‘ since their W-CDMA and CDMA2000 platforms are far more efficient, and have richer ecosystems, than their larger rival’s TD-SCDMA.
However, the availability of TDD spectrum and Mobile’s aggressive 4G moves are likely to push the other two cellcos into deploying TD-LTE more quickly than they had envisaged. China Telecom’s chairman Wang Xiaochu told Digitimes that the firm planned to adopt dual-mode FDD/TDD-LTE equipment, using the FDD flavour for coverage and TDD, which will run in higher bands in China, for urban capacity. Telecom had planned to go FDD-only until the government decided to insist on prioritizing TD-LTE for all carriers, not just Mobile.