China Mobile is set to join Long Term Evolution trials already being carried out by Vodafone and Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone.

"China Mobile is happy to work with Vodafone and Verizon Wireless to explore TD-LTE together with FDD LTE as a high-performance and low cost evolution option from our current networks. This will help to build an ecosystem that could result in a win-win situation for the whole industry to meet the growing customer demand for wireless broadband," said Sha Yuejia, China Mobile's vice president, in a press release.

The resultant three-way operator trials will focus on LTE Frequency Division Duplex for use with paired spectrum allocations and TD-LTE, the Time Division Duplex version of LTE, as an evolution of current TD-SCDMA technology to enable the exploitation of unpaired spectrum globally. The trials are designed to explore the performance of LTE with different spectrum types as a potential next generation mobile technology. They will provide an opportunity to adopt a harmonized access platform with global scale and high performance inter-working with the existing technologies of all three companies.

The availability of LTE FDD and TD-LTE systems will enable an effective and low cost solution for both paired and unpaired spectrum. Multi-mode devices will create regional and global roaming opportunities. This also raises the prospect of providing greater interoperability between different global operators offering customers greater convenience and seamless global roaming.

The LTE technology, which is still being tested and standardized is designed to deliver mobile data networks with higher speeds and throughput performance, lower latency, global roaming, and improved efficiencies. LTE is an evolution of existing 3G (WCDMA, TD-SCDMA and CDMA) cellular networks and has the advantage of offering inter-working with existing 3G technologies.