China Mobile, India's Bharti Airtel, South Korea's KT, Japan's Softbank and Vodafone have teamed up to help foster the development of the TD-LTE ecosystem and work towards paving the way for 5G.
The five major operators have agreed to a five-year strategic plan to push the development and adoption of TD-LTE and work towards convergence of the TDD and FDD ecosystems, the Economic Timesreported.
As part of the plan, known as GTI 2.0, the operators will also work towards fostering a cross-industry 5G ecosystem.
Bharti Airtel uses a hybrid TDD/FDD architecture and Reliance Jio Infocomm is rolling out a pan-India TDD network. The two operators were among the early adopters of TD-LTE technology. Despite this, TD-LTE adoption has otherwise remained low in India.
But with operators already pursuing carrier aggregation, demand for TD-LTE as a complement to FDD LTE is expected to increase in the near future.
TD-LTE adoption has lagged FDD LTE adoption globally as well. The new initiative could help address this imbalance.