Asia Pacific Telecom (APT), Taiwan’s smallest mobile operator, plans to launch a TD-LTE network on the 2.6GHz band in the second half of the year.

The company claims it will be the first commercial TD-LTE network in Taiwan and aims to deploy 300 base stations and 11,000 small cells by year-end, DigiTimes reported.

It had 1.7 million subscribers at end-April, all of which were 4G after the last of its 2G and 3G users migrated to its LTE network over the last few quarters. The company previously announced its aim was for all subscribers to use its 4G network by end-Q1 2017.

APT with a 5.5 per cent market share is the fifth ranked mobile operator in the country, behind market leader Chunghwa Telecom (33 per cent), Taiwan Mobile (23.9 per cent), Far EasTone (23.6 per cent) and Taiwan Star (14 per cent), according to GSMA Intelligence.

The operators had signed up nearly 19 million 4G customers at end-March, accounting for about 60 per cent of total mobile subscriptions. Chunghwa and Far EasTone together have 12.3 million LTE users, or 70 per cent of their user bases.

Time-Division Duplex (TD-LTE) is one of two variants of LTE technology alongside Frequency-Division (LTE-FDD), which use unpaired and paired spectrum respectively. Despite being jointly developed by companies including China Mobile, Datang Telecom and Huawei, TD-LTE is less widely deployed than FD-LTE.