MediaTek is the main responsible for bringing Chinese market up to speed and offer powerful budget phones. Every budget phone, including the XiaoMi HongMi, sports a MediaTek chip : it is either the MT6589 or the MT6589T.
So when China is gearing up to welcome great numbers of 4G smartphones, some legitimate questions are rising. Will those 4G smartphones be compatible with US or European carriers ?
2 different LTE network
China Mobile is opting for TD-LTE and China Unicom is going the hybrid way : first supporting TD-LTE (China is only licensing this for the moment) and then FDD-LTE.
Worldwide, the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) recently revealed that 182 of the world’s 200 LTE networks use FDD-LTE with nine using TD-LTE. The remainder use a combination of the two.
But unlike 3G netwoks : TD-SCDMA and WCDMA which are mutually exclusive, 4G networks are not.
The Global TD-LTE Initiative (GTI), the operator group supporting the technology, has made FDD-LTE interoperability central to its efforts, to enable the seamless coexistence of both options.
European and US carriers have chosen FDD-LTE network.
So, everything comes down to the SoC and if the chip supports those networks.
MediaTek MT6290 4G LTE will support every networks available :
- 2G networks : Edge and GSM
- 3G networks : WCDMA, TD-SCDMA
- 4G networks : TD-LTE, FDD-LTE
The MT6290 will be a quad-core chip, nothing else is known as of today. But it is very likely it is going to be based on the Cortex A7, and IT Power VR GPU solutions.
Others precisions will be given on a phone to phone basis at first, so everything will be clear before purchasing a 4G device.
The chip should be available soon before the end of the year.
For future references, you can check on which 4G network your carrier supports : Wikipedia
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