“China Mobile Ltd. said Thursday it has reached consensus with Apple Inc. on using its fourth-generation technology on iPhones to be offered by the Chinese mobile services provider,” Chester Yung reports for MarketWatch. “However, China Mobile Chairman Wang Jianzhou said talks with Apple on launching the iPhone remain ongoing.”
“Wang told reporters that there are over 4 million China Mobile customers using the iPhone,” Yung reports. “Currently, China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. is the only Chinese mobile operator to offer them.”
Yung reports, “Wang also said the company plans to start commercial trials of the 4G technology it is promoting, called time-division long term evolution, or TD-LTE, in China beginning next year.”
Read more in the full article here.
[Attribution: MacRumors]
It is not just Apple agree to do TD-LTE, more important is that whether Qualcomm etc agrees to do TD-LTE chips. Without chips in large, cost effective commercial vial-able quantity, no one wants to produce TD-LTE phones.
Are you sure, TD-LTE, is not China’s version that doesn’t require Qualcomm? I mean, China Mobile, has their own version of 3G called TD-SCDMA.
The thing about any “time division” (TD) protocol is that it’s far easier to spy on than a “code division” (CD) protocol. Why? Because at least you know which packets are part of which stream, because you can tell by the time algorithm. Code division targets the packets by (possibly encrypted) header information, and just ignores packets not meant for that device. Cryptographically, an encrypted code-division protocol is far more secure than a time-division protocol.
And that’s why the Chinese don’t like it.
BTW, standard LTE is pure code-division.