Chinese vendor ZTE and China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MII) said this week they have completed what they claim is the world’s first S1/X2 interface conformity test for TD-LTE.

What this actually means is that the TD-LTE system wireless and core networks, and ZTE’s in particular, is fully compliant with 3GPP standards. The S1 interface communicates between the LTE base station and the EPC packet core network, while the X2 interface sits between base stations.

ZTE was invited by the MII to conduct the trial in advance of mass-scale system tests by the ministry and leading Chinese mobile operator China Mobile.

Equipment spending by Chinese mobile operators is estimated to hit $41bn over the next two years, and vendors are throwing their weight behind TD-LTE, the Time Division flavour of LTE, as it will be rolled out by China Mobile.

In related news, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) has also made a high resolution live video call between TD-LTE devices connected to separate TD-LTE networks. This world first was made using China Mobile’s pre-commercial TD-LTE network and National Chiao Tung University’s (NCTU) TD-LTE trial network in Taipei.