China Mobile and Clearwire have agreed to work together to accelerate the development of TD-LTE devices for a robust device ecosystem that supports multi-mode, multi-band devices with minimum component complexity and cost.

China Mobile and Clearwire both support the global 2.5 GHz spectrum band for 4G deployments and both operators have conducted successful TD-LTE trials and tests using commercially available/production-ready TD-LTE devices from numerous vendors. The two companies plan to work jointly to further accelerate the time-to-market availability of high volume TD-LTE chipsets and devices that should be commercially available starting in 2012. In addition, the two companies will collaborate to enable worldwide data roaming among TD-LTE, FDD-LTE and other 2G/3G networks.

"The availability and cost of TD-LTE devices are critical success factors for operators to deploy TD-LTE networks. The cooperation with Clearwire will leverage economies of scale in the two largest markets in the world to speed up the development of TD-LTE devices," said Mr. Jianzhou Wang, Chairman of China Mobile Communications Corporation. 

Clearwire expects to launch a next-generation LTE network that will offer more capacity than any other 4G network in the United States and by working with China Mobile, It expects to benefit from a device ecosystem aimed to support billions of potential users worldwide.