TD-LTE gathers momentum

The next generation of China’s homegrown mobile technology, TD-LTE, is gathering momentum among the vendor community, as a public demonstration of the platform starts up at the World Expo in Shanghai.

Motorola, working with China Mobile, has deployed and is supporting an indoor TD-LTE network for “a couple of thousand” dongles at the Expo, which takes place in Shanghai between May and October this year.

The company said a single TD-LTE USB dongle can stream 24 simultaneous video streams while supporting high speed internet browsing applications, at a total data rate of 20Mbps.

The US vendor also announced that it has completed the Phase I TD-LTE field trials with China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), demonstrating key functionality, performance and mobility test cases in a multi-sector, multi-site environment.

During the trial, Motorola demonstrated a downlink throughput of up to 80Mbps, with TD-LTE trial sites overlaid on existing 2G/3G sites.

Motorola and the MIIT are now ready to begin Phase II TD-LTE field trials with an increased focus on applications and quality of service (QoS) in Shunyi, Beijing.

At the same time, handset vendor Samsung and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) have announced what they claim is the “world’s first end-to-end TD-LTE data call”. The data call was made using a prototype end user USB dongle from Samsung and infrastructure from NSN, namely the Flexi Multiradio Base Station and the company’s core network solution, including the Flexi NS (Network Server) and the Flexi NG (Network Gateway) – all using LTE software compliant with the 3GPP March 09 baseline specifications.The trial was conducted at NSN’s R&D Center in Hangzhou, China.