The state of mobile broadband in India is being closely watched as the wireless industry waits to see whether WiMAX or LTE will become the dominant technology in the world’s fastest-growing telecommunications market.

The WiMAX camp argues that Indian carriers should deploy WiMAX because of its scale, devices, lower costs and time-to-market advantage. The LTE community argues that India should deploy LTE because it will trump WiMAX in the long term with both scale and devices.

Alcatel-Lucent 4G chief Ken Wirth says LTE will win. “I think you’ll see India deploy LTE in the second half of 2011,” he says, though Qualcomm is the only company with BWA spectrum in India to officially announce that it will deploy the time-division version of LTE, TD-LTE, instead of WiMAX. Reliance Industries has also sent out signals that it is leaning toward TD-LTE but has not confirmed its plans.

TD-LTE runs on unpaired spectrum bands and has been criticized as being too far behind FDD-LTE, the paired spectrum variety of LTE, to be a viable technology for India’s mobile broadband market. Not so, says Wirth. “It’s only three to six months behind FDD-LTE, and we’re working with six device partners on TD-LTE,” he says. “There will be TD-LTE dongles in the first quarter of 2011, with smartphones in the second half of next year.”

Development of TD-LTE equipment and devices progressed rapidly after it became clear that the technology stood a chance in China and India. Wirth says one-third of Alcatel-Lucent’s 50 LTE trials are oriented toward TD-LTE, with the company doing test runs with Chunghwa Telecom, China Mobile and France Telecom’s Orange.

The industry is eagerly awaiting the release of mobile broadband spectrum in China. Wirth says the latest he’s heard is that China’s 4G spectrum will open for business in about a year. “It’s all device and ecosystem dependent,” he says of the Chinese market. “They want to have plenty of devices when they launch 4G.”

Wirth says Alcatel-Lucent “absolutely” has a fair shot of competing against Chinese infrastructure vendors when the country decides to move forward with LTE deployments. The company is currently doing LTE pre-deployment work with operators in both China and India and has been testing TD-LTE in China for more than a year, Wirth says.