China Mobile said on Thursday that it plans to team up with foreign carriers to establish a Time Division Long-Term Evolution (TD-LTE) trial network overseas in the next six months.

Wang Jianzhou, chairman of the world's biggest cellphone carrier, said many telecom operators in Asia, Europe and North America have expressed an interest in developing TD-LTE networks.

"We will cooperate with foreign operators to develop scale TD-LTE trial networks in their countries in the second half of this year," he said.

China Mobile is the major backer of TD-LTE, which the company regards as the successor to China's homegrown third-generation (3G) TD-SCDMA standard.

Because TD-SCDMA was believed by some to be less sophisticated than the CDMA200 and WCDMA standards adopted by China Telecom and China Unicom, China Mobile has been trying to shift to the next-generation technology.

Since last year, China Mobile started testing TD-LTE technology and established a large-scale trial network for the Shanghai World Expo.

Wang said on Thursday that the company plans to expand the network to more Chinese cities in the coming months.

"In the next six to 12 months, TD-LTE as a technology will be ready for commercialization," said Bill Huang, general manager of China Mobile Research Institute, adding that the company will launch several test products supporting the trial TD-LTE network, including wireless WAN cards and wireless routers, by the end of 2010.

Over the past decade, 64 operators from 31 nations and regions announced LTE commercial deployment plans, of which 22 will initiate network deployment this year, and the others will start by the end of 2012, according to the Global Mobile Suppliers Association.

The number of LTE networks is set to grow significantly with the number of subscribers exceeding 100 million by 2014, said a report from Juniper Research.

(China Daily June 4, 2010)