Three Asian majors take different approaches to LTE trials

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Three Asian majors take different approaches to LTE trials

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 19 November, 2009

Much of the recent activity around LTE trials has centered on Europe, but this week the focus shifted east as three Asian carriers vyed for top billing with very different technical and commercial approaches to their plans to deploy the new system starting (in a limited way) late next year. As China Mobile, NTT DoCoMo and SingTel outlined their plans, there was further progress in the thorny area of voice over LTE, with increased efforts to bring IMS and interim approaches into harmony.

China Mobile has made no secret of its desire to introduce a 4G overlay at the earliest opportunity, using the TDD flavour of LTE to compensate for the competitive disadvantages of being forced to use an unproven 3G system, TD-SCDMA. Now the cellco has awarded contracts to build a TD-LTE network in Shanghai in time for the city's World Expo, which runs from May to October next year.

Like Mobile's 3G network for the Beijing Olympics, the system will serve to showcase Chinese advances to the outside world, as well as be a reasonably challenging testbed for future commercial performance and services, gaining the carrier the headstart in real world experience that it has lacked in 3G.

China Mobile also hopes its early moves will help prevent TD-LTE being seen as a secondary, poor relation in the LTE ecosystem, as TD-SCDMA has been in 3G, leading to a shortage of devices and applications. CEO Wang Jianzhou this week repeated his call for a unified TDD/FDD standard - first voiced, with Vodafone support, at Mobile World Congress in February. He said he wished to see a "single [TDD/FDD] chipset to achieve global economies of scale and global roaming capability" and added that this view was "not only supported by operators, the GSMA and NGMN, but has also gotten commitment of manufacture from network vendors and chipset suppliers."

He said the Shanghai World Expo network would cover 5.3 square kilometers, both indoor and outdoor, using 20MHz of spectrum. This will give the cellco a chance to put its potential suppliers through their paces. Participating in the project will be most of the key 3G vendors - Huawei, Motorola, Alcatel-Lucent, ZTE, Datang, Ericsson and NSN. Some have already been working on TD-LTE tests and trials with the operator, notably Motorola in Madrid and Beijing - talking up the advantage of the TDD expertise it has gained in WiMAX - and NSN with a prototype TD-LTE femtocell (a key element of Mobile's deployment strategy).

Silicon suppliers working on the project will include the inevitable Qualcomm and Samsung, but also France's Sequans, a WiMAX specialist. This supports the view that some companies will use the TDD and OFDMA experience gained in WiMAX to move sideways into LTE and perhaps steal a march on larger rivals coming up from 3G. Also involved on the silicon side is local chipmaker Innofidei, which specializes in mobile TV. The Expo system will mainly serve special dongles, and the first has been produced by Motorola, whose role in Shanghai will be to focus on indoor coverage, and which has unveiled the world's first TD-LTE USB modem for the 2.3GHz and 2.6GHz LTE bands.

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