Current and Planned Mobile Spectrum in China
Anyone concerned at the scale and takeup of TDD LTE can stop worrying.
According to the China Daily the world’s largest mobile company by subscriptions China Mobile which has over 700 million mobile customers is letting a contract for 207,000 TDD LTE base stations. They are currently down the track with a 13 city trial rollout with kit from ZTE and Alcatel Lucent. CM is expected to concentrate on the 2.6GHz (2.57 – 2.62 GHz) TDD LTE band 38.
CM’s 2013 capital spend has increased to $30Bn USD more than half of which will go on the new TDD LTE network. Telecom Asia reports that CM plans to cover 100 cities and 500 million population with the 200K base station deployment. The Telecom Asia article points to the large quantity of under utilised TDD spectrum around the world.
The potential booming LTE TDD network equipment and device market may see these underutilised assets pressed into service to feed the growing appetite for mobile and wireless data services especially in high population developing markets.
Unwired/Austar Now Optus/NBN Broadband Wireless Spectrum
Optus’ rather more modest investment in TDD LTE following its $252M purchase of Vivid from Channel 7 in February 2012 has seen it deploy 2.3 GHz TDD LTE at 13 sites in Canberra (launched in June 2013) and taking this to 50 sites this year.
Optus has 98 MHz of 2.3 GHz and 65 MHz of 3.4 GHz TDD spectrum as part of the Vivid purchase. This is mainly in capital cities. The other 2.3 and 3.4 GHz spectrum assets were previously owned by Austar are now being used by NBN Co for the wireless part of the NBN rollout.
These previously underutilised spectrum assets, licenses for which run out in 2015, are now seeing increased use.