TD-LTE Hits First Delay, More to Come? TD-LTE技术首次延期未来还会更多？

By newsdoug on October 11, 2011

TD-LTE hits first delay After reporting just yesterday that first-phase trials had wrapped up in 6 cities for TD-LTE, the 4G technology being developed by China Mobile (HKEx: 941; NYSE: CHL) (Chinese article), domestic media are reporting today that those same trials weren’t quite as clean as the first reports indicated, spotlighting the inevitable delays this technology will face in getting to market. China Mobile has been trialing TD-LTE on an expanded basis in 6 major cities since this spring, with domestic firms Huawei, ZTE (HKEx: 763; Shenzhen: 000063) and Datang, and global players Ericsson (Stockholm: ERICb), Nokia Siemens and Alcatel Lucent (Paris: ALU), all seeking to showcase their technology in hopes of winning big future contracts when a national commercial network is built. Now it seems that two of the smaller players in the trials, Samsung (Seoul: 005930) and a company I’ve never heard of called New Postcom, have fallen behind in the trials by failing to complete their work for technical reasons. (English article; Chinese article) Frankly speaking, this particular delay looks rather small and insignificant, as neither Samsung nor New Postcom are major players in this area and their failure to deliver technology on time would probably have minimal impact on the building of new networks. But what these delays do highlight is the fact that TD-LTE is a completely new technology, and it’s probably only a matter of time before we see more significant big problems coming from the likes of Huawei and Ericsson as their trials become more advanced. People who follow the industry will recall that TD-LTE’s 3G predecessor, TD-SCDMA, was looking fine in its early trial stages until numerous issues started emerging later on, including all kinds of technological problems that continue to haunt China Mobile’s commercial 3G network to this day. TD-LTE could see less problems, since it’s a follow-on to TD-SCDMA, which was completely new, and it’s also closer technologically to other more globally accepted 4G standards. Still, such technological glitches are almost inevitable, and this first round of problems, while they appear small, are a reminder that more significant problems are almost guaranteed to appear as the trials become more advanced. Such problems will almost inevitably push back the timeline for a commercial rollout TD-LTE, making a service launch unlikely before before 2013, and perhaps more likely in 2014.

Bottom line: Newly disclosed delays in China Mobile’s 4G trials are a sign of things to come, with more significant problems almost guaranteed to push any commercial launch to 2013 at earliest.

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