China didn’t issue the TD-LTE licenses until the end of 2013, and issued the FDD-LTE licenses in February 2015, finally starting full construction of LTE networks, which was late than many developed countries in the time schedule. However, China is also the fastest LTE network builder, in less than 2 years, China has built over 1.3 million LTE base stations; according to the plans of the three major operators, this number will reach 2 million by the end of 2015. 4G subscribers have developed from null and exceeded 250 million, all the statistics are in the top place in the world.
In order to get rid of the disadvantageous competitive factors in the initial stage of 4G commercialization, China Telecom has officially launched commercial carrier aggregation (CA) networks in 17 key cities, although the former Chairman Wang Xiaochu was transferred to China Unicom, the plan will not be changed. In addition, he may accelerate the development of 4G network of China Unicom. In the past two years, China Unicom has fell into the dilemma of whether choose 3G or 4G, while in the second half of this year, China Unicom has launched CA pilots in Jiangsu, Shanxi and other provinces.
China Mobile is also very enthusiastic about CA. The CEO Li Yue has said that it would heavily promote the use of LTE-A CA technologies in 2015, and make both the systems and devices support CA technologies. In January, China Mobile started a batch of CA trials in the existing 4G networks in Shenzhen. On June 17th, China Mobile Guangzhou branch started LTE-A Cat.9 based triple-CA technology test with the supports of ZTE and Qualcomm, the downlink peak rate reached up to 330Mbps, which was 3 times of the current TD-LTE network.
From the current trials, pilots and commercialization situation of the three major operators, we could found that they all agree with the “Full Drive Burst” impact of CA technologies in the 4G network competition, which means that the commercialization process of CA may be accelerated.