Since December 4th of 2013, on which day the MIIT issued TD-LTE licenses to China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom, the three major operators have launched LTE commercial services, according to the data released by the MIIT, LTE subscribers have reached 14 million by the end of June, of which subscribers of China Mobile reached 10 million, distributed in 300 cities.
China Mobile officially started LTE commercial services on December 18th of 2013. Last month, the vice president of China Mobile Li Zhengmao said, by the end of June, the number of TD-LTE base stations of China Mobile has exceeded 400,000, with network covering more than 300 cities, according to the plan, the number of TD-LTE base stations is meant to be more than 500,000 by the end of this year. On December 13th of last year, China Mobile completed the first LTE TDD-FDD VoLTE interoperability trail with SK Telecom. China Mobile Guangzhou branch uses eSRVCC technology to support VoLTE in the TD-LTE network, in April of this year, the FDD/TDD LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation trail was also completed, the testing rate of the air interface reached 250 Mbps. By the end of this year, the number of LTE subscribers of China Mobile is estimated to reach 50 to 60 million.
China Unicom launched its TD-LTE services in 25 cities on March 18th, 2014, and is planned to cover 100 cities by the end of this year. The service-quality report of China Unicom of 1H2014 shows that, China Unicom built 5,773 new TD-LTE base stations in the first half of the year, covering 56 key cities, and actively promoted TDD/FDD hybrid networking trails in 16 cities.
China Telecom launched its commercial LTE services on February 14th in this year, it initially planned to launch LTE services in 100 cities. In June, China Telecom announced the start of LTE hybrid network trails in 16 cities, systematically verifying the hybrid development model of LTE FDD and TD-LTE network. China Telecom hasn't released the number of its LTE base stations, but its first batch of planned base stations in last year is more than 60,000. China Telecom said, in order to provide the subscribers with high-quality 4G experiences, it would invest more than CNY 40 billion on 4G network in 2014, in the next two or three years, China Telecom will continue to invest funds in the network construction.
According to the statistics of GSA, by the end of July 14th, 168 vendors in the world have introduced 1889 LTE devices. Only in last year, the new LTE products amounted to 941, in which most of the devices support both TDD and FDD network simultaneously. Among them, the devices which support TD-LTE network reach 530, that is 330 more than of last year.