China Mobile, the number one telecom operator in the
world, and Clearwire, a provider of 4G wireless broadband services in the
United States, announced a collaboration to accelerate the development of
TD-LTE devices.
Specifically, the two companies agreed to work together
to cultivate a robust device ecosystem that supports multi-mode, multi-band
devices with minimum component complexity and cost.
China Mobile
and Clearwire both support the global 2.5 GHz spectrum band for 4G deployments
along with many other operators around the world. To date, both China Mobile
and Clearwire have conducted successful TD-LTE trials and tests using
commercially available/production-ready TD-LTE devices from numerous vendors.
The two companies will work jointly to further accelerate
the time-to-market availability of high volume TD-LTE chipsets and devices that
should be commercially available starting in 2012. In addition, the two
companies will collaborate to enable worldwide data roaming among TD-LTE,
FDD-LTE and other 2G/3G networks.
“The availability and cost of TD-LTE devices are
critical success factors for operators to deploy TD-LTE networks,” said
Jianzhou Wang, chairman of China Mobile Communications.
“The cooperation with Clearwire will leverage
economies of scale in the two largest markets in the world to speed up the
development of TD-LTE devices. We anticipate the widest variety and most cost
effective high performance devices – modems, routers, smart phones and tablets
– to provide end users with affordable advanced mobile broadband
services,” Wang added.
“We expect to launch a next-generation LTE network
that will offer more capacity than any other 4G network in the United
States,” said John Stanton, executive chairman of Clearwire.
“By working with China Mobile, we fully expect to
benefit from a device ecosystem aimed to support billions of potential users
worldwide. This unmatched scale should reduce costs and increase choices for
our customers in the years ahead,” Stanton added.
This announcement further supports Clearwire’s recent
announcement of its intent to add LTE technology to its 4G network. By joining
forces on TD-LTE technology, product, deployment and roaming solutions, China
Mobile and Clearwire are well positioned to build a viable and competitive
TD-LTE ecosystem for the highest demand 4G markets on the globe.
Recently, Sevis Systems announced receipt of a
multi-million dollar award
from China Mobile to provide A.bis optimization across 1100 sites in China.
Prior to receiving the award, Sevis underwent rigorous
testing by China Mobile, and was certified against all of their RAN vendors
including Ericsson, Nokia-Siemens, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola, Nortel,
and ZTE.
By Telecomlead.com Team
