Based on its commitment to deploy commercial wireless services based on Long-Term Evolution, China Telecom has now been granted membership in the GSM Association.

According to the GSMA, China Telecom will begin the commercial deployment of LTE as early as 2010.

LTE was developed to enable a significant increase in the bandwidth achievable over mobile networks, while also boosting network capacity and reducing latency. LTE is designed to be interoperable with widely-used global technologies such as GPRS, WCDMA and HSPA, building on the all-pervasive international roaming capabilities available today.

More than 74 mobile operators from around the world have committed to plans, trials or deployments for LTE, with many more commitments expected to be announced over the coming year.