LTE, TDD and Femtocells
Even if it sounds like the good, the bad and the ugly, this could be one of the winning combination in the industry. The idea comes from Bill Huang from China Mobile apparently. And it’s not bad at all. The vast majority of 3G licenses comes with a TDD “bonus”, not used so far. And why not use TDD spectrum for LTE capacity coverage? It could be named TD-LTE.
Combine this with femtocell concept, and you will have the new capacity/coverage/price killer combination. With a promised bill of materials of less than $100 for an LTE femtocell in 2010/2001 this is orders of magnitude cheaper than anything you could use today for capacity coverage for indoor, metro, etc.
I have thought this almost one year ago, that you could use femto for indoor coverage, not necessarily for content rich capacity backup. If this would be cheap enough you could extend the indoor capacity for 3G/LTE spectrum very easily. Just put it indoor somewhere, plug it in your FTTx/DSL and that’s it.