China's MIIT today issued China Telecom and China Unicom their long-awaited FDD-LTE licences.
Officially the new permits are 'trial licences' for 16 cities to test out FDD-TDD integration. However, precedent suggests the two operators will face few obstacles in upgrading to full commercial service in the next 12 or so months.
Both Telecom and Unicom have been reluctantly pressed into building out 4G using the government-backed TD standard. The first 4G licences, issued last December, specified TD only.
China Mobile has embraced TD-LTE because of the limited acceptance of its TD-SCDMA 3G system. It claims it will have built out a TD network in 300 cities by year-end.
China Telecom has said it would use TD for no more than 30% of its coverage, and primarily in high-density urban areas.
China Unicom has been the slowest to upgrade to 4G because of its desire to extract more value from its W-CDMA network and did not call its first LTE tender until last December.
The go-ahead for FDD will have no impact on vendor contracts and will probably mean little material change in network rollouts. Both companies are still in the early stage of deploying 4G and will have already developed FDD plans ahead of the licence issue.