Chairman Wang – chairman and CEO of China Mobile, the world’s largest operator by subscribers – today revealed further details on his company’s planned move to LTE technology. Reiterating hopes that a unified TDD/FDD standard for LTE can be developed, he spoke of his desire to see a “single [TDD/FDD] chipset to achieve global economies of scale and global roaming capability.” He said that this idea “is not only supported by operators, the GSMA and NGMN, but has also gotten commitment of manufacture from network vendors and chipset suppliers. All of them agree to support the merger of TD-LTE and FDD-LTE.”

Commenting on plans to launch a trial TD-LTE system covering the World Expo 2010 event in Shanghai (which runs from May to October next year), Chairman Wang said the network will cover 5.3 square kilometres of the site, both indoor and outdoor, using 20 MHz of spectrum. Network equipment suppliers will include Huawei, Motorola, Alcatel-Lucent, ZTE, Datang, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks, as well as silicon suppliers Sequans, Samsung , Qualcomm and Innofidei.

One area concerning Chairman Wang is deployment of voice services over the future LTE network, as there is not yet an industry consensus on the best way to enable this. “Our preference is an IMS-based solution but we could also fall back onto existing 2G and 3G networks and use LTE just for data.”
Regarding the operator’s current deployment of 3G technology based on homegrown TD-SCDMA technology, Chairman Wang said rollout is “progressing smoothly.” The operator is targeting 3 million TD-SCDMA connections by 2009 but recognises that more low-cost TD-SCDMA handsets are required. “CNY1000 [US$146] is our target,” he added. On the subject of handsets, Chairman Wang noted that the company remains in talks with Apple over potential sale of the iPhone.