TD-LTE is used extensively in China (China Mobile) and Sprint in the US today. In Europe, there are only few deployments so far and I haven’t come across one until recently when I was in Stockholm. And again, there was more deployed than I initially thought!
In Part 1, I had a look at what’s on the air in rural Sweden and Hutchison 3 used FDD bands 20 (800 MHz) and 7 (2600) in this area. In Stockholm, however, they are also using the TD-LTE band 38 (2600 MHz). And not only with a 20 MHz carrier, no, they are on air with TWO 20 MHz carriers in addition to their FDD-LTE carriers in band 20 and 7. Despite uplink and downlink being on the same channel in TD-LTE, Hutchison 3 has an impressive 60 MHz of LTE on air that they don’t have to share with another network operator (unlike Telenor and Tele2 that share their LTE resources via net4mobility). Combined with TD-TD and FDD-TD carrier aggregation that should give them a nice fat channel that should be able to handle demand for some time to come.