ALU first to gain a place in China Mobile's TD-LTE trial
It will build end-to-end network in Shanghai, most other large vendors likely to join six-city project
Published: 27 March, 2011
READ MORE: China | Alcatel-Lucent | China Mobile | LTE
Alcatel-Lucent has made a strong start in LTE deals thanks to its presence in the big two US contracts, and it also believes it will have a significant lead in the TDD flavour of the standard. This will come later than the FDD version, but will be seen in major trials or early stage deployments in China and India from later this year. ALU is to participate in wide scale trials at China Mobile, the biggest flagwaver for TD-LTE.
The vendor's Shanghai Bell unit will deploy an end-to-end TD-LTE solution for China Mobile's trial in Shanghai. The other cities selected for the tests are Beijing, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Shenzhen and Xiamen. ALU and Motorola were the equipment suppliers for Mobile's showcase network for the Shanghai World Expo last year, but all the major vendors are likely to take part in these broader trials, with local OEMs Huawei and ZTE almost certain to take a role. Ericsson, Nokia Siemens (soon to acquire Motorola Networks, if it can get past Chinese antitrust probes), NEC and Datang could also be involved. Datang has been working on trials with government agencies in Beijing, also involving Mobile.
China Mobile will start its equipment tender process in May or June - already six months behind earlier reported plans to choose the vendors by the start of this year. As usual, there are conflicting views about the pace of Chinese network roll-outs. Despite bullish comments from Mobile about launching live TD-LTE in some areas this year, and spending several billion dollars in 2011-2012, government officials recently indicated roll-out would not happen on a broad scale until 2014.
ALU said it was selected for the new Shanghai trial after successfully completing various interoperability tests with two terminal suppliers over the past year. This was important, said ALU's Asia-Pacific chief Rajeev Singh-Molares, as it demonstrated "our commitment to create an open TD-LTE ecosystem that will participate in the broader global LTE value chain". The interoperability tests were conducted in the 2.3GHz and 2.6GHz bands for indoor and outdoor deployments respectively. The vendor has been chosen to take part in 13 TD-LTE trials in seven countries to date.
Seeking to enhance the appeal of its current TD-SCDMA 3G network, China Mobile says it will expand the portfolio of devices running its Ophone brand and software platform, and is still in talks to get an iPhone like rival China Unicom. Chairman Wang Jianzhou told Mobile World Live: "Ophone is the combination of Android and China Mobile's services. They are welcomed by our customers. We will develop more Ophones and we have got the support from different vendors. And in terms of iPhone, we continue the discussion and negotiations with Apple." However, some analysts say Ophone has not attracted much support yet and accounts for just 1% of Chinese smartphones.
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