I recently wrote an ABI Research Insight titled, "Is China Mobile Abandoning TD-SCDMA?" Certainly it has been rather quiet on the TD-SCDMA front. So when China Mobile's purported statement that it was sourcing TD-LTE handsetsfrom Huawei and Nokia based on WindowsPhonesmartphone technology, it would raise someeyebrows.
China Mobile may be putting its resources together to hit the ground running with TD-LTE, once it is given official permission to commercially launch the service, but TD-SCDMA will not be sidelined. In the meantime, TD-SCDMA is steadily percolating away. We estimate almost 10 million TD-SCDMA subs were added to the installed base of 59.5 million in 1Q-2012. That may be only 10% of China Mobile's total subscriber base, but it is definitely growing.