The China Daily today reports that the world’s largest mobile market won’t launch commercial, nationwide LTE services until 2014. Citing comments from the Chinese Minister of Industry and Information Technology, Miao Wei, the report claims that the timeframe will allow maturity of TD-LTE technology, which is still in the relatively early stages of development. The report also cites Miao as stating: “It is obvious that the Chinese government doesn’t want to adopt a 4G service too soon as that would disrupt the carriers’ efforts to develop 3G services” further.

Although a 2014 rollout would put China a long way behind other mobile markets in terms of LTE progress, in reality it is a realistic timeframe as the country also lagged in deployment of 3G services. According to Wireless Intelligence, 3G services currently make up only 15 percent of the country’s total mobile market. All three Chinese operators – China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom – are expected to deploy variants of LTE technology as their ‘next-generation’ platform; China Mobile is focused on TD-LTE while the other two are likely to deploy LTE based on the FDD variant of the technology.