Altair TD-LTE chipset hits 50Mbps in China Mobile demo

Altair Semiconductor, a developer of LTE chipsets, has shown off its TD-LTE chipset running at up to 50Mbps on the downlink, and 18Mbps on the uplink. The demonstration was made to China Mobile executives at a Next Generation Mobile Network (NGMN) Alliance board meeting using an AsiaTelco manufactured USB dongle.

Altair said in a statement that prior to the recent HGMN meeting it had completed months of testing with China Mobile.

“The combination of AsiaTelco’s strong product integration expertise and our field proven TD-LTE chipsets has allowed us to bring one of the first commercial grade TD-LTE solutions to market,” said Eran Eshed, vice president of marketing and business development at Altair Semiconductor. “Our customers not only benefit from a very mature and field proven TD-LTE solution, they also get to use the exact same chipset and software platform to serve FDD LTE markets – and in any LTE frequency band globally. This is an extremely valuable proposition which provides us with tremendous market traction.”

The ability to use one chipset for every LTE frequency could prove to be a major boon to dongle and handset manufacturers, and could circumvent the need for spectrum harmonisation. At the recent LTE World Summit on Amsterdam, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom and TeliaSonera called on the industry to use 1800MHz spectrum as a global LTE standard.

TDD is the preferred technology for LTE networks in China due to its spectral efficiency and earlier this year ZTE and Swedish operator Hi3G partnered on what they said would be the world’s first TDD/FDD dual-mode network.

Recently, Per Kangru of JDSU suggested to Telecoms.com that more European operators should look at TDD spectrum saying that its asymmetrical nature provided a closer fit for how data services were used by end users.