China Mobile andUSAbased WiMAX network, Clearwire have announced a collaboration to accelerate the development of TD-LTE devices. Specifically, the two companies agreed to work together to develop multi-mode, multi-band devices with minimum component complexity and cost.

To date, both China Mobile and Clearwire have conducted successful TD-LTE trials and tests using commercially available/production-ready TD-LTE devices from numerous vendors.

The two companies will work jointly to accelerate the availability of high volume TD-LTE chipsets and devices that should be commercially available starting in 2012. In addition, the two companies will collaborate to enable worldwide data roaming among TD-LTE, FDD-LTE and other 2G/3G networks.

“The availability and cost of TD-LTE devices are critical success factors for operators to deploy TD-LTE networks,” said Mr. Jianzhou Wang, Chairman of China Mobile Communications Corporation. “The cooperation with Clearwire will leverage economies of scale in the two largest markets in the world to speed up the development of TD-LTE devices,”

The announcement supports Clearwire’s recent decision to add LTE technology to its WiMAX network.