TD-LTE gaining momentum

By BP Tiwari On April 29, 2010 · 1 Comment

The industry around TD-LTE is gaining momentum and the appeal of TD-LTE has widened well beyond China. The recent announcement of Qualcomm to bid for TDD spectrum in India to support a TD-LTE deployment confirms the emergence of TD-LTE as global technology, likely to command a substantial market share.

First of all, China mobile is behind TDD LTE global adoption. The operator has announced that it will establish three experimental TD-LTE (time division-long term evolution) networks separately in three coastal cities – Qingdao, Xiamen and Zhuhai – beginning the third quarter of 2010, according to the China-based China Business News and it will migrate its TD-SCDMA based network to TD-LTE as their next evolution.

Second,

Clearwire paved the way for LTE in US when they submitted a proposal to adopt the 2496MHz-to-2690MHz frequency band in the US for TD-LTE, and it was accepted at a 3GPP meeting earlier this month. The acceptance is significant because it will enable Clearwire and other spectrum holders to deploy TD-LTE, which is the time division duplex (TDD) version of LTE, in the US. Clearwire was not alone in asking for the 2.6GHz spectrum to be defined as a TDD band for LTE. Indeed, there was broad industry support for the proposal from other companies, including: Sprint Nextel Corp. , NII Holdings Inc. , China Mobile Communications Corp. , UK Broadband Ltd. , Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT), Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. , TD Tech Ltd. , WiChorus Inc. , ZTE Corp. , Chinese Academy of Telecommunications Technology , Nokia Siemens Networks , Cisco Systems Inc., Sequans Communications , Alcatel-Lucent , Alcatel Shanghai Bell Co. Ltd. , and Rohde & Schwarz GmbH & Co. KG .

Third,

Japanese cell-co Softbank Mobile is considering deployment of TD-LTE standard as a 4G network. Senior executive vice president Ted Matsumoto told telecomasia.net that the company could deploy it in the 2.5GHz spectrum it had gained access to ,when it bought a stake in failing PHS operator Willcom last month. But he said Willcom’s next-gen PHS technology, XGP, and mobile Wimax were also under consideration.

Fourth, As Qualcomm prepares to bid for broadband wireless access (BWA) spectrum in India with the intention to deploy TD-LTE, the world’s largest infrastructure supplier, Ericsson has begun making the case as to why LTE in the band makes more sense than WiMAX for BWA operators in India.

Fifth, the Taiwanese operator Far EasTone said it will jointly develop a next generation TD-LTE mobile network in Taiwan for testing purposes with China Mobile.

Sixth, suppliers are getting ready to demonstrate their readiness to support TD-LTE based deployments. Motorola demonstrated end to end readiness to support LTE TDD with USB dongle devices in Shangai Expo. In a parallel move, Nokia Siemens Networks has inaugurated a TD-LTE Open Lab at its Hangzhou R&D facility and are trailing their base stations with China Mobile. Huawei will deploy TD-LTE demo network along with Motorola in China. Ericson, Alcatel lucent, ZTE and Samsung are developing LTE-TD based systems for commercial deployments.

Seventh, Qualcomm, Altair, Sequans, Innofidei, Wavesat has indicated availability of TD-LTE chipsets in 2.3/2.5 GHz. Others like Beceem , Runcom are also developing chipsets and release dates are not committed/known. Possibly QUALCOMM would the first to release LTE-TD samples. QUALCOMM is will put together available TD-LTE engineering samples ( MDM 9600) most likely in 2Q 2010. Commercial availability of chipsets is planned one quarter later. Other chipset supplier will have commercial readiness by Q4 2010. Assuming 2 quarters for ODMs for finished products, it is reasonable to assume availability of LTE-TD devices in Q2 -2011.

Finally

It looks like the time to market advantage for WiMAX is still not over as we see Q1/Q2 2011 as the most optimistic initial deployment timelines of TD-LTE system and initial device would never compete the current prices of WiMAX , however the ecosystem behind LTE can drive significant volume and has the ability to quickly create a competitive ecosystem of device supplier and operators.