spectrum, allowing deployment in even tighter frequency bands than TD-CDMA. It is standardized by the 3GPP and also referred to as "UTRA-TDD LCR". However, the main incentive for development of this Chinese-developed standard was avoiding or reducing the license fees that have to be paid to non-Chinese patent owners. Unlike the other air interfaces, TD-SCDMA was not part of UMTS from the beginning but has been added in Release 4 of the specification. Like TD-CDMA, TD-SCDMA is known as IMT CDMA TDD within IMT-2000. The term "TD-SCDMA" is misleading. While it suggests covering only a channel access method, it is actually the common name for the whole air interface specification. TD-SCDMA / UMTS-TDD (LCR) networks are incompatible with W-CDMA / UMTS-FDD and TD-CDMA / UMTS-TDD (HCR) networks. Objectives TD-SCDMA was developed in the People's Republic of China by the Chinese Academy of Telecommunications Technology (CATT), Datang Telecom, and Siemens AG in an attempt to avoid dependence on Western technology. This is likely primarily for practical reasons, since other 3G formats require the payment of patent fees to a large number of Western patent holders. TD-SCDMA proponents also claim it is better suited for densely populated areas. Further, it is supposed to cover all usage scenarios, whereas W-CDMA is optimised for symmetric traffic and macro cells, while TD-CDMA is best used in low mobility scenarios within micro or pico cells. TD-SCDMA is based on spread-spectrum technology which makes it unlikely that it will be able to completely escape the payment of license fees to western patent holders. The launch of a national TD-SCDMA network was initially projected by 2005 but only reached large scale commercial trials with 60,000 users across eight cities in 2008. On January 7, 2009, China granted a TD-SCDMA 3G licence to China Mobile. On September 21, 2009, China Mobile officially announced that it had 1,327,000 TD-SCDMA subscribers as of the end of August, 2009. While TD is primarily a China-only system, it may well be exported to developing countries. It is likely to be replaced with a newer TD-LTE system over the next 5 years. Technical highlights TD-SCDMA uses TDD, in contrast to the FDD scheme used by W-CDMA. By dynamically adjusting the number of timeslots used for downlink and uplink, the system can more easily accommodate asymmetric traffic with different data rate requirements on downlink and uplink than FDD schemes. Since it does not require paired