Global players flirt with TD-LTE

TD-LTE seems to be the mobile industry’s acronym du jour.

Until recently its long-term future was generally considered to be confined to China, in light of plans by the world’s largest mobile operator to use the technology as the upgrade to its 3G (TD-SCDMA) networks. Meanwhile industry consensus was that the vast majority of the world’s mobile operators would eventually upgrade their own CDMA and W-CDMA based networks to LTE using the FDD (paired band) variant of the technology. Certainly China Mobile’s support of TD-LTE gave the standard global recognition, but global deployment never seemed a reality.

In the space of two weeks though TD-LTE has crept out of its Chinese comfort zone and been unexpectedly linked to some of the world’s most influential mobile markets. Mobile chip giant Qualcomm – a company with the ear of the industry’s biggest players – has expressed its intent to bid to deploy TD-LTE in India’s upcoming Broadband Wireless Access (2.3GHz) auctions. Meanwhile it has emerged that a group of high-profile operators and vendors – including Sprint Nextel, China Mobile, Clearwire, NSN, Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco Systems – are lobbying for the standard to be deployed in the US in the 2.6GHz spectrum band. Reports state Russian operator Svyazinvest has also picked TD-LTE for mobile broadband deployment. These developments are a major blow to the WiMAX camp, the technology normally associated with such spectrum bands.

If the Indian and US plans prove successful in particular, new opportunities in the hardware space will emerge. Whilst all of the major network vendors have spent the last year touting the performance of their TD-LTE infrastructure kit (alongside their FDD wares) in an effort to curry favour with China Mobile –indeed, the operator is trialling kit from Huawei, Motorola, Alcatel-Lucent, ZTE, Datang, Ericsson and NSN at the World Expo 2010 event in Shanghai later this year – we are yet to hear much talk of TD-LTE devices, even from a prototype perspective.

HTC has promised future compatible handsets, whilst RIM is working on TD-LTE BlackBerry devices for China Mobile. Nokia is a safe bet for eventual TD-LTE handset support given its work with China Mobile on TD-SCDMA 3G services, but elsewhere public backing for the technology from device vendors has been somewhat muted. The US and Indian developments may just change that.

Most significantly, there will be greater focus now on industry efforts to produce a converged LTE device, capable of supporting both TDD and FDD versions of the next-generation technology. At the GSMA Mobile World Congress in 2009, China Mobile, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone heralded their work on TD-LTE, claiming that earlier trials were “a step towards the goal of developing a single device capable of operating on TD-LTE technology in the case of unpaired spectrum or LTE FDD technology in the case of paired spectrum.”

An update on progress would be timely. Qualcomm and ST-Ericsson have already said they are among chipset vendors working on development of silicon for such devices; it will now be interesting to monitor developments from handset, dongle and device manufacturers. The long-term market for converged TDD/FDD LTE devices is a potential goldmine.