China's 3G standard will be ready this year - report
By Total Telecom staff
07 February 2002
China's homegrown 3G standard will be ready for commercial use within the year, according to co-developer Datang Telecom, which had previously pegged 2003 as its earliest launch date.
According to Chinese newspaper China Daily, Zhou Han, chairman of Datang Telecom, said the TD-SCDMA standard (time division synchronous code division multiple access), jointly developed by Datang, German electronics giant Siemens and the China Academy of Telecommunications Technology (CATT), had now proved its maturity and would be ready for implementation this year.
Datang claims that TD-SCDMA has advantages in frequency utilization efficiency over rival standards, allowing it to support more users within the same frequency band, the paper reported.
"It's very suitable for China which has limited frequency but a big population base," Datang spokesman Lou Qinjian was quoted as saying.
TD-SCDMA will have to make up a lot of ground, however, in order to compete with WCDMA, the European-developed 3G standard set to achieve world dominance, and the CDMA2000 standard developed by U.S. pioneer Qualcomm.
The Chinese government is still monitoring the development of 3G and has not yet decided which standard to follow, China Daily reported. Siemens, however, has already gambled on which standard will be adopted. "I am confident that China will surely use its own developed technology," Peter Borger, vice-president of Siemens China, told the newspaper.
Cooperation between Datang, Siemens and the CATT began in 1998, when few companies had high expectations for the TD-SCDMA standard. In March 2001, however, the ITU-T accepted the technology as one of the global standards for 3G. Because of strong government support, it is likely to be at least one of the technologies licensed for 3G in China.
The technology has encountered problems, however. It was revealed by CommunicationsWeek International last month that TD-SCDMA commercial trials planned by three Chinese mobile operators had been postponed from January until the third quarter of 2002. The magazine quoted developers as saying a number of technology and handset issues had forced the postponement.
The delay could make it less likely that TD-SCDMA will be adopted by the operators - China Mobile, China Telecom and China Railcom - as it gives WCDMA and CDMA2000 a further head start.
"They have to make TD-SCDMA work within this year," Jay Chang, vice president of Asian equities research at Credit Suisse First Boston, told CWI at the time. "If they can't prove [the technology] to the operators this year, then it won't work."
Meanwhile, Siemens' IC Mobile Group said on Thursday that TD-SCDMA had "performed impressively" in the latest tests conducted with the CATT.
Siemens said engineers had reached a milestone with the TD-SCDMA field trial network by making successful video calls from a vehicle traveling at high speed without any loss in quality. |
