China may acquire 4G services in 2012

The world’s largest wireless operator, China Mobile has stated that China may start the commercial use of its homegrown 4G telecommunication technology in 2012, and large-scale commercial trials will begin next year.
According to Bill Huang, General Manager of the China Mobile Research Institute, TD-LTE, the next-generation telecommunication standard that China Mobile is promoting, will see large-scale development in 2011.
Huang added that the full-scale commercial tests of TD-LTE will first be conducted in cities mainly in the Pearl and Yangtze River deltas. Some foreign carriers, such as Poland’s mobile operator Aero2, seemed more eager to develop TD-LTE than China Mobile, since they had expressed an interest in opening commercial TD-LTE networks as early as 2011.
Huang pointed out that it was the rapid development of the mobile Internet that prompted worldwide telecom operators to quicken the pace of building TD-LTE networks. The data explosion in the era of mobile Internet has worried telecom operators. They have to expand and upgrade the current 3G networks and start launching 4G projects.
According to Wang Jianzhou, Chairman of China Mobile Communications Corp, China Mobile’s strategy in facing the challenges of the mobile Internet era was to accelerate the expansion of 3G network, start commercial usage of TD-LTE and increase the coverage of the Wireless Local Area Network. China Mobile’s voice business has slowed down – since the company previously realized a year-on-year 40% increase from phone calls, but the figure declined to 20 percent in the past two years. But the income from data services continues to rise for China Mobile, as data revenue accounts for 30 percent of China Mobile’s total sales.
Wang added that the figure is climbing and they still have room to grow, as some foreign carriers achieved a data revenue percentage of more than 50%. The increased data traffic requires an expanded network and China Mobile will build up more than 200,000 TD-SCDMA base stations by the end of this year, allowing its network to cover all cities across China.
Many international telecom operators have expressed willingness to adopt TD-LTE technology to build mobile broadband networks.
In addition to Poland’s Aero2, which hoped to deploy the world’s first commercial TD-LTE network in early 2011, Softbank Telecom in Japan was also interested in TD-LTE and planned to use it to upgrade the services of  Willcom Inc – a company Softbank purchased this year, according to Communications World Weekly.
Article via  wirelessfederation