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Marvell to roll dice on China Mobile's LTE
Junko Yoshida
3/14/2013 3:06 PM EDT
200,000 TD-LTE base stations
Others also question when LTE licenses will actually be issued to Chinese operators by the government.
Marvell’s Lee dismissed such skepticism. He said, “That’s not that relevant any longer, because operators are going out and building the LTE network right now.” China Mobile’s chairman Xi Guohua said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year that the carrier planned to build a TD-LTE 4G network with 200,000 base stations to cover more than 100 Chinese cities, home to 500 million potential users. Lee observed, “200,000 base stations are very substantial. They will cover 80 to 90 percent of prefectural cities in China.”
A majority of Chinese smartphones are using the 3G networks -- with China Unicom offering the WCDMA networks and China Telecom with CDMA. Meanwhile, China Mobile is using the nation’s homegrown 3G network called TD-SCDMA.
Using an iPhone on China Mobile's TD-SCDMA today can be as slow as being hooked up to a 2G network. But with the Chinese public’s growing demand for smartphones (including iPhones) and China Mobile’s commitment to LTE, it seems only natural that smartphones capable of functioning in the emerging LTE networks will soon become a must.
When asked how Marvell hopes to compete against Spreadtrum, which is capitalizing on its own TD-SCDMA solutions, and MediaTek, which pioneered its own turnkey designs, Lee said that Marvell’s differentiation will lie in “our strength in the international market and Marvell being one of the leading LTE chip-set companies.”
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Others also question when LTE licenses will actually be issued to Chinese operators by the government.
Marvell’s Lee dismissed such skepticism. He said, “That’s not that relevant any longer, because operators are going out and building the LTE network right now.” China Mobile’s chairman Xi Guohua said at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year that the carrier planned to build a TD-LTE 4G network with 200,000 base stations to cover more than 100 Chinese cities, home to 500 million potential users. Lee observed, “200,000 base stations are very substantial. They will cover 80 to 90 percent of prefectural cities in China.”
A majority of Chinese smartphones are using the 3G networks -- with China Unicom offering the WCDMA networks and China Telecom with CDMA. Meanwhile, China Mobile is using the nation’s homegrown 3G network called TD-SCDMA.
Using an iPhone on China Mobile's TD-SCDMA today can be as slow as being hooked up to a 2G network. But with the Chinese public’s growing demand for smartphones (including iPhones) and China Mobile’s commitment to LTE, it seems only natural that smartphones capable of functioning in the emerging LTE networks will soon become a must.
When asked how Marvell hopes to compete against Spreadtrum, which is capitalizing on its own TD-SCDMA solutions, and MediaTek, which pioneered its own turnkey designs, Lee said that Marvell’s differentiation will lie in “our strength in the international market and Marvell being one of the leading LTE chip-set companies.”
Related stories:
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