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China to Pursue Third Way for 3G
October 31, 2002 - source: BWCS
The Chinese government has, as expected, announced its support
for the domestically developed 3G standard TD-SCDMA. According to
Reuters, the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (MII) and
the country’s largest mobile operators, China Mobile and China Unicom,
have given their joint backing to the standard. There has been some
speculation, however, that the lack of high-ranking officials from
either mobile operator at the announcement means that the telcos
are not wholly in support of the plan to push TD-SCDMA.
TD-SCDMA has been developed by the Chinese vendor Datang Telecom
and Technology in partnership with the German equipment supplier
Siemens. The widespread adoption of TD-SCDMA would spell bad news
for proponents of the two leading global 3G standards, cdma2000
and W-CDMA.
Over the past twelve months the Chinese government has been evaluating
all three technologies and is shortly expected to announce a decision
on its favoured 3G standard. Many analysts believe that China will
ratify more than one 3G standard and, with mobile spectrum at a
premium, the more spectral efficient cdma2000 would seem to have
the edge over W-CDMA as candidate number two.
In a related development, Lucent Technologies has announced that
it has completed voice and data calls in its Chinese test labs using
cdma2000 technology at 2.1GHz. The US vendor stated that the equipment
would form part of the Chinese government’s ongoing trials of 3G
networks. Meanwhile, China Unicom, which now has 2.3 million CDMA
subscribers, will begin deploying the first stage of the cdma2000
migrationary 3G standard within the next few months.
While the 3G standards picture in China remains unclear for the
moment, what is certain is that the Chinese market potentially offers
huge rewards to backers of the chosen technologies. According to
MII figures, there were 176 million mobile subscribers in China
by mid-2002, up from 145 million at the end of 2001. While voice
services continue to make up the bulk of operator revenues, SMS
usage is surging in the People’s Republic and a strong domestic
mobile internet industry is developing.
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