- At a news conference held in Beijing on March 4, China Mobile announced that the company plans to speed up the deployment of its mobile networks based on 4G technology, the China Daily News reported on March 4, citing chairman of China Mobile, Wang Jianzhou. Wang stated that Japanese Softbank Telecom will deploy the first commercial network based on TD-LTE (Time Division-Long Term Evolution) technology in Japan by year-end 2011. China Mobile has been developing networks based on such technology since late 2007 and is projected to complete the large-scale network demonstration based on TD-LTE by mid-2012, according to China's MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology). At year-end 2010, China Mobile began to conduct large-scale tests on its TD-LTE demonstration networks located in six major cities, including Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Xiaman. Wang said at the news conference there are a total of seven cities conducting tests so far but Wang did not revel the name of the additional city, according to the same source. Meanwhile, Wang also revealed that Apple mulls developing an iPhone based on TD-LTE technology, Reuters reported. Further details, however, were not yet disclosed.