KDDI Finally Makes Its LTE Schedule Clear...

KDDI announced that it would start deploying LTE and is looking to complete the deploymenr by 2012. The contract was awarded to Motorola and NEC a few days ago.

The deal includes base stations from Japan's NEC and although the announcement gave no idea of the breakdown of the orders, but most analysts seem to think that Motorola will get the lion's share of the order.

KDDI's network is a full two years behind that of NTT DoCoMo. The news lifted KDDI's stock, which had previously not made its LTE schedule clear as it is also a major investor in Japanese mobile WiMAX with UQ Communication which has an aggressive WIMAX rollout schedule. The operator has set itself a target of more than 90% population coverage nationwide by the end of March 2010. By that time, UQ says it will have 1,161 cities covered through 38,000 base stations, which includes 19,000 femtocells.

KDDI will deploy its LTE network in both 1.5GHz and 800MHz bands and will conduct LTE trials in mid 2010.

At the LTE World Summit in London in Novmber 2008, the KDDI speaker was very unclear about its strategy when he said that they would be deploying both LTE and WiMAX networks and left the audience feeling very confused. KDDI is clearly not putting all its eggs in the LTE basket, but why the need for the two networks, no one is sure either.

Motorola Making a Success with TD-LTE Trials in China

Motorola has just successfully completed a joint over-the-air trial with operators in China (including China Mobile) as part of ongoing collaborative TD-LTE trials continuing throughout 2009. Key trial results include:

• First company to complete download throughput up to 70 Mbps in a 20 MHz bandwidth channel
• Mobility and hand-over with live applications
• Multi-User Equipment (UE) testing under one sector

Globally, Motorola is working on both TD-LTE and FDD-LTE solutions as are all of the major infrastructure manufacturers, with initial commercial products due out in Q4, as TD-LTE is said to be about 3-6 months behind FDD. This latest trial success follows other milestones during 2009, which included the launch of an LTE advanced self-organizing network (SON) solution back in May, deployment and demonstration of a live LTE network at CTIA in April, and the opening of a new testing centre in the UK back in February. As far as the Asian market goes, Motorola currently provides GSM/GPRS/EDGE, CDMA2000, and WCDMA network solutions in China.

China Mobile has been the main operator globally that is pushing for TD-LTE, which Bill Huang, GM for China mobile Research Institute giving a keynote at the LTE World Summit in London in November. China Mobile will also have a strong presence at the LTE Asia conference in September in Hong Kong with over 15 participants confirmed.

For more information on Informa's LTE Asia conference, please visit www.lteconference.com/asia