China Mobile 'very likely' to expand 4G trials

China Mobile chairman Xi Guohua said it was “very likely” the operator would expand its TD-LTE trials this year.

It has run trials in five cities – Beijing, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen – since last year, and plans to build out another 20,000 base stations in ten cities this year.

This was likely to be expanded, “but it depends on how fast the total industry develops," he said.

Xi said the technology was working well but the bottleneck was at the device end.

“As long as we have the devices we can build out the base stations in a very short period of time, and we can also upgrade [the existing TD-SCDMA] network in a very short period of time.”