“In fact, the world’s largest cellco has gone its usual route of breaking its contract into a large number of chunks and including just about all the contenders in the mix – nine equipment suppliers have been selected.

This approach can be complex to manage, in terms of a harmonized network deployment across China’s scattered and diverse regions. However, it gives Mobile access to the innovations and brainpower of as many companies as possible, which it regards as critical as it builds the world’s largest platform for TD-LTE.

The operator has been determined not to be left in a technology backwater as it was with its TD-SCDMA 3G network, and has been putting its considerable weight behind getting every infrastructure and device maker to support a TD-LTE ecosystem. It is also working closely with other holders of unpaired spectrum round the world to encourage build-outs and roaming deals, and so drive economies of scale.

China Mobile has already been working with a number of vendors on its trial TD-LTE build-outs, which are larger and more service-rich than many fully commercial deployments in other countries. However, it will only be able to turn on full commercial services once it receives its 4G licence, expected late this year or early 2014. Therefore this new round of contracts is the largest so far, with a total value of CNY20bn ($3.27bn), though it certainly will not be the last chance for suppliers to get a piece of the huge network.

Together, the companies will build a network covering 31 provinces with 207,000 TD-LTE base stations. The roll-out will be closely watched round the world, especially by other TDD operators such as Sprint/Clearwire in the US, Sprint’s majority owner Softbank of Japan, and Bharti Airtel and Reliance Infotel in India. However, there will be lessons for the wider LTE community too, since Mobile is increasingly taking on the role familiar among Japanese and Korean carriers – experimenting with new architectures, and driving suppliers’ R&D programs accordingly, a process which can inject significant funds into next generation architectures, and also goes a long way to defining ‘4G+’ platforms for the whole world.

For instance, China Mobile has been running extensive trials of Cloud-RAN architectures, and wants to scale these up dramatically to support 100 or more cell sites in the macro layer, with all their baseband processing virtualized in the cloud. This approach to network design is likely to become increasingly mainstream, and many of the rules will be established by this Chinese deployment. Here Alcatel-Lucent will be particularly important (along with other C-RAN partners like Intel and ZTE). ALU may have received only about 11% of the deal, reportedly, but it has worked closely with Mobile on a TDD version of its lightRadio design, which will be key to C-RAN and HetNet deployments.

The cellco also aims to be a leader in small cells (it calls its own version of this technology the ‘nanocell’), both for LTE and Wi-Fi (where it already accesses a network of perhaps two million hotspots). Therefore it will move quickly to a full HetNet, in which the various layers of cells, in different bands, will interwork fully to create a seamless pool of capacity. It has the advantage of a relatively clean slate, a huge budget and a vast resource of sites with fiber backhaul. Few will be able to emulate that elsewhere, but they will certainly be able to study the possibilities of the new architectures when deployed at scale.”

http://www.maravedis-bwa.com/templateemail/newsletters/092413/china-mobile-shops-widely-to-expand-its-td-lte-ecosystem.html