According to the industry resources, China Telecom has obtained FDD LTE experimental network license in its internal announcement and accepted the allowance to build network in many cities.

But according to previous information of TD industry alliance, it is unlikely to issue FDD LTE license in China this year.

On June 20th, three China main telecom operators announced their subscriber development reports in May. The amounts of China Mobile and China Unicom mobile subscribers keep increasing, while that of China Telecom shows a descending trend. As statistics show, in May, China Telecom has lost 950,000 mobile subscribers; net lost 4.36 million from January to May. China Telecom says the reason for the descending is because its competitors have launched LTE service and strengthen market promotion, intensifying the competition.

Since the end of last year, three operators obtained TD-LTE license, China Telecom has appeared subscriber net lost phenomenon; though many reasons caused the decline, but as for time, impact of TD-LTE cannot be ignored.

China Telecom Chairman Wang Xiaochu expressed the eagerness for FDD LTE license on many public occasions, hoping the company can go back to the mainstream mobile communication market by FDD LTE network deployment and operation, to get rid of its “minority” identity, especially solve the industry problem of device.

Previously, China Telecom’s 4G strategies locate TD-LTE as a data subnet which is without voice function, the integration with FDD LTE network is quite superficial. But now China Telecom has made the compromise to realize the true integration: it has released several mobile devices which support CDMA+TD-LTE network from April.

After obtaining the experimental network license, China Telecom can conduct large scale network construction; though it has to wait for FDD LTE formal licenseing in the end of this year or the beginning of next year, China Telecom can also offset part of the backwardness disadvantage, and get more policy support, like frequency spectrum.

Insiders say, China Telecom will be the biggest beneficiary on 1.8GHz and 2.1GHz frequency band of FDD LTE frequency spectrum distribution; huge amount of new-added spectrum resources lay solid foundation for the following market competition.