Yuhong Huang, Deputy General Manager of the China Mobile Research Institute, sees the TDD industry and market receiving a boost in early 2013.
Huang summarizes four major achievements in the LTE TDD industry, with the most important being the Chinese government’s announcement of new spectrum (190MHz) in the band of 2.6GHz for TDD. The second is operators’ commitment to promoting the LTE multi-band, multi-mode terminals, as unification is crucial to scalability and global roaming. The third one is the fact that many core GTI operators are actively discussing and planning LTE roaming tests. The fourth and most exciting is that many operators are working together to promote LTE TDD convergence with LTE FDD in the consumer and M2M markets, as well as other vertical markets.
As to what’s next, Huang doesn’t see network performance as a challenge, as successful operator testing has been extensive. Huang sees the challenge now as being with terminals and inter-working, as the former are key to the success of the LTE TDD industry. Huang is confident that as commercial scale widens worldwide, particularly in light of China Mobile’s participation, there will be more and more terminals. Huang also emphasizes the importance of network inter-working for legacy compatibility and FDD-TDD convergence.
