Li Zhengmao, vice president of China Mobile, said on October 12nd that China Mobile has actively conducted the construction ofTD-LTE network and has built the world’s largest 4G network in just one year. In August, China Mobile completed the annual construction plan of 1 million TD-LTE base stations and the 4G subscribers have accumulatively reached 230 million with an average increase of more than 20 million in each month. 

Network coverage and performances continued to improve

"China Mobile will continue to build and optimize this high-quality 4G network", he said in an speech on the 5th Seminar of TD-LTE Technology and Spectrum, China Mobile’s 4G network has covered 85.4% of the population of China by August, and the high-speed rail 4G network coverage reached a total of 23.5 thousand kilometers, basically achieving full coverage of the high-speed rails.

In addition to expanding the coverage, China Mobile is constantly improving the network performance and has already started deployment of the LTE-A carrier aggregation (CA) technology, many hot spots have achieved the highest rate of up to 220Mbps, some cities is testing the triple-CA with the network speed up to 330Mbps. China Mobile is also committed to accelerating the commercial process of VoLTE, it is expected that the whole network will be capable of commercial conditions in December of this year, each city will start the VoLTE commercial business successively and provide voice call services with higher quality and lower prices.

China Mobile's TD-LTE commercial network is in operation in a wide range of frequency bands. Of the 1 million TD-LTE base stations, 5,000,000 are built on the 1.9GHz frequency band, 3,000,000 are on the 2.3GHz and 2,000,000 on the 2.6 GHz.

China Mobile also actively carries out the construction of 3.5GHz trail network, it has completed peak rate performance tests in 4 cities, the peak rate could reach up to 1Gbps under the penta-CA technology. In the next stage, China Mobile will start the networking capabilities tests and further promote the development and maturity of 3.5GHz frequency band technologies and products.

In addition to vigorously promote the development of TD-LTE technologies, China Mobile is also actively promoting the development of TDD/FDD integration network. China Mobile Hongkong branch started the deployment of LTE TDD/FDD integration network in December 2012, which has made impressive developments in the last two years and the number of 4G subscribers is expected to exceed 1.6 million by the end of the year.

Device business continues to go strong

The development of device and device business will greatly determine the life of a technology, especially when it is a ” niche” technology, therefore, TD-LTE is doomed to make more efforts in these two aspects.

In the term of device technologies, China Mobile is committed to create the Global Phone together with the industry, which can be sold in the global market and support all the existing networks in the world, Li Zhengmao said.

By the end of June in this year, sales of China Mobile TD-LTE devices have accumulatively exceeded 210 million and completed the annual sales plan; TD-LTE devices which have got network access licenses are exceeded 1,000 and support GSM, WCDMA, TD-SCDMA, LTE FDD, TD-LTE and other modes, "the devices could be used all around the world”, the multi-modes supporting devices achieved full coverage of the network modes with the lowest price of less than $50 ($47).

In the business aspect, data intensive APPs have gradually become the core of the content, which bring rapid increase of the data traffic and drive the rapid development of mobile broadband technology.

In this trend, China Mobile will continue to promote the rapid maturity and commercialization of converged communication and conduct business transformation; in the other side, China Mobile will actively expand the Car Networking, mobile health care, mobile E-commerce, mobile education and other new information service markets, at present, it has launched “and-education”, “and-health care” and other business in many provinces and cities.

Promote the evolution of 4G to 5G

In talking about the focus of future work, Li Zhengmao stressed that China Mobile will continue to dig the potential advantages of TDD, making it play a greater role in 4G evolution in the future, China Mobile will actively promote the development of 5G and create a win-win 5G ecology.

In promoting the future evolution of 4G, China Mobile hopes to cooperate with the industry and make full use of TDD’s technology advantages in the future evolution, promote the maturity of 3D-MIMO, tetra-antenna reception, greater bandwidth aggregation and other technologies and industries, it will introduce the 3.5GHz and other new frequency bands, improve the TD-LTE network speed to 600Mbps and even exceed 1Gbps in the future. At the same time, China Mobile will achieve the multi-frequency bands CA of FDD and TDD, ensuring the 4G network to meet the increasing needs of higher mobile broadband capabilities caused by the rapid increases of data traffic before the commercialization of 5G.

In the development of 5G, China Mobile has actively carried out researches of key technologies, it has increased researches of the new business and new markets and is dedicated to the formation of global standards.

On the Global TD-LTE Initiative (GTI) Shanghai summit that held in July, China Mobile proposed the establishment of 5G joint innovation centers, on the one hand, it can carry out key technologies verifications, system tests and experiments to promote the maturity of technologies, products and industries; on the other hand, the development of 5G innovation applications from the market perspective makes 5G technologies, standards and product R&D be suitable with the emerging 5G markets and business needs. Therefore, China Mobile set five major research fields, including Internet of Things, Car Networking, Intelligent Manufacturing, robots and virtual reality, hoping to build a win-win 5G ecology by cooperation with the industry.

Li Zhengmao also put forward three proposals to the regulatory agencies of every country and the global industry, the first is to achieve global united distribution of the 1.9GHz/2.3GHz/2.6GHz/3.5GHz and other mainstream TDD spectrum and share the scale benefits; the second is to fully play the advantages of TDD technologies and promote the 4G evolution and global applications of TD-LTE, finally promote the global economic development with 4G; the third is to jointly promote the development of 5G, form global unified standards in the future and actively explore the new 5G markets with 5 times more spectrum resources than now.