China Telecom ready for LTE by 2010

After the massive telecoms revamp late last month, it looks like the Chinese mobile operators haven’t been put off their stride. According to a report over at Comms Day, China Telecom has decided to opt for LTE.

The report quotes China Telecom CEO Wang Xiaochu as saying the company will first upgrade its services to EV-DO Rev A in major cities to help encourage the uptake of data services, and then the company will move both its GSM and CDMA networks onto LTE “in two to three years’ time”.

I wonder how Telecom’s LTE plans will go down. LTE may seem an obvious choice for operators – there’s a clear migration plan and a shedload of operators around the world going down the same route and so helping to build an ecosystem around the technology – but in contrast, China’s government is really rather keen on seeing the country’s networks take up the homegrown variant of 3G, TD-SCDMA. Could the next step be a homegrown LTE standard?