LIVE FROM THE GSMA MOBILE ASIA CONGRESS 2010: Hong Kong’s CSL is ready to go live with its LTE network and is set to launch a raft of new multimedia services that will take advantage of the higher-speed technology. The operator’s CEO, Joseph O’Konek, told delegates at Congress today that the new network was “being rolled out as we speak” and already covers a “broad area” of Hong Kong. “For the first time in 30 years the industry has a global standard,” he said. “You will feel the difference on LTE; now we have the bandwidth we can finally offer all those things we’ve been talking about for years.”

O’Konek said that CSL already has an “award-winning” dual-carrier HSPA+ network in place that has allowed the operator to support rising levels of mobile data traffic. He noted that CSL’s data traffic is currently quadrupling year-on-year and currently accounts for 80 percent of total traffic on its network. 

CSL is expected to commercially launch LTE before year end and is likely to become the first Hong Kong operator to do so. Wireless Intelligence forecasts that this first-mover advantage means that CSL will be Hong Kong’s largest LTE operator over the next five years, commanding a dominant LTE market share of around 40 percent by 2015. CSL demonstrated a voice-over-LTE call on the new network earlier this week. View the video footage here.

O’Konek was joined on stage by CSL’s main network vendor, ZTE. The Chinese vendor’s president, Shi Lirong, said that “operators and vendors must work together to win the market in LTE” – as ZTE and CSL had done to great effect in Hong Kong. He told delegates that the firm was also concentrating on combining TD-LTE and FDD-LTE on the same platform in order to offer a “converged solution.” He said ZTE had recently won a contract at an (unnamed) European operator, which has requested a converged TD/FDD LTE network to be built to overcome spectrum limitations.