Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) said it performed the first bidirectional handover between LTE's FDD and TDD flavors on a live network. The handover was accomplished on China Mobile Hong Kong's Ericsson-supplied LTE network, which operates in FDD mode.
"As the handover demonstrates, Ericsson can offer operators a fully integrated FDD/TDD network that, from a systems point of view, is as simple as handover between a system running two frequencies," said Ericsson, which noted that Altair Semiconductor supplied the commercial chipset for the demo. Ericsson and Altair are collaborating on interoperability design testing (IODT) of LTE technologies with an aim toward encouraging development of non-proprietary industry solutions.
"Interworking between LTE FDD/TDD in networks will be of increasing importance for operators that have spectrum for both LTE modes," said Ericsson because that will enable operators to offer mobile broadband services on all of their LTE spectrum, thus increasing capacity and improving the consumer experience.
China Mobile is the most high-profile mobile operator championing TD-LTE. Last week at the GSMA Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai, China Mobile Chairman Xi Guohua said that his company's TD-LTE trial is going smoothly and that the real bottleneck for deployment will be getting enough devices made
Other operators that have hopped on the TD-LTE bandwagon include Japan's Softbank Mobile, which already has deployed a network compatible with TD-LTE, and Clearwire (NASDAQ:CLWR) in United States, which has targeted mid-2013 for its TD-LTE launch.
Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent (NASDAQ:ALU) hold the top spots in overall LTE revenue share, but Huawei and ZTE captured the first top spots in TD-LTE sales thanks to their work with Softbank, according to a recent report from Dell'Oro
Although it currently lags FDD-LTE in popularity, the TD-LTE variant will make up 25 percent of all LTE connections by 2016 as it gains more market acceptance, according to research firm Ovum.
For more:
- see this Ericsson release
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