Unlike the Government of India with its flip flop policies and High Corruption, China will embrace both the TD-LTE and FD-LTE. China Mobile is promoting a 5-mode TD-LTE smartphone that includes WCDMA and not CDMA. China Mobile will introduce Jego (a Skype-like service), which targets overseas Chinese
China Unicom and China Telecom still look for FDD-LTE licenses to follow the TD-LTE licensing. China Telecom would be the only carrier in the world to offer CDMA+TD-LTE and thus will be unable to motivate the supply chain given its small scale. The government will help CT (to level the playing field) in such a way to drive smooth evolution of CT’s LTE wireless efforts. Both CT and CU welcome OTT given their low SMS exposure.
While both TD-LTE and FDD-LTE as standalone networks could be technologically mature, a major challenge in a commercial system is the need for inter-technology handovers; i.e., 4G handover to either the underlying 3G network, or directly to the 2G network. From a user perspective, such handovers are basic requirements and need to be seamless. However, they require high precision coordination between the network and the handset, and potentially one of the most challenging aspects from a new technology commercialization perspective. We believe this was a major perceived problem in the early part of China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA commercial service.