China Mobile and Vodafone joined Verizon Wireless in confirming plans for LTE at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. As part of their ongoing three-way trials, the operators have successfully demonstrated in laboratory conditions the time division version of LTE (TD-LTE) showing that the technology is capable of operating effectively in both unpaired as well as paired spectrum.
The availability of a converged LTE FDD and TD-LTE system is set to enable an effective solution for both paired and unpaired spectrum. This also raises the prospect of providing greater interoperability between different global operators offering customers greater levels of convenience.
The TD-LTE portion of the trial, which involves seven vendors, will progress to full field trials in the second half of 2009. The locations for these field trials have been agreed in China, Europe and India.
The corresponding LTE FDD trials are progressing as planned and are now well into the final field trial stages where peak download speeds of up to 50 to 60 Mbps using 10 MHz bandwidth have been demonstrated. These field trials, which will also be introduced for the TD-LTE trials, create real-world loaded network conditions by using multiple base stations and terminal devices.
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