China Unicom Signs Up for BREW
China Unicom Signs Up for Qualcomm System to Sell Mobile Data
By Kenneth Wong
Beijing, March 6 (Bloomberg) -- China United Telecommunications Corp., the nation's second-largest cell-phone company,
signed an agreement to use California-based Qualcomm Inc.'s standard for mobile data, which will allow users to send e-
mail and download games and other services.
For China Unicom, the new standard may help boost disappointing subscriber numbers in its two-month-old CDMA
network. For Qualcomm, the agreement may lend weight to its sales pitch to other phone companies in the region.
``We are talking to many operators and are seeing a lot of interest from them,'' Paul Jacobs, group president of Qualcomm's
wireless and Internet division, told reporters at a conference in the Chinese capital.
Indeed, Jacobs need point no further than neighboring South Korea to demonstrate how Qualcomm's binary runtime
environment for wireless, or BREW, could enhance Unicom's sales. KT Freetel, Korea Telecom Corp.'s mobile phone unit,
said average spending per user rose 9 percent after it started using the standard in November.
Unicom signed an agreement to use the BREW standard when it upgrades its CDMA voice call-only network midyear to
make it faster and to allow it to handle data services. The system is the first nationwide network to use
Qualcomm-developed technology.
Only 439,000 of Unicom's 28 million cell customers used CDMA service after the first month of service, most of them
transferred from a defunct network. The lower-than-expected number is blamed on the unavailability of CDMA handsets
and on concern among users that higher quality isn't necessarily worth the extra cost.
China Mobile
China's government expects the country's mobile phone companies to add 50 million new customers last year, compared
with 60 million last year. There are now about 150 cell phone subscribers, making the county the largest mobile-phone
market.
Unicom's bigger rival, China Mobile Communications Corp., serves about three-quarters China's mobile users with, using the
global system for mobile communications (GSM) standard.
China Mobile started selling data services last year through new handsets with built-in software, limiting the kind of
applications users can download. BREW allows phone users to download any software written using the standard.
Jacobs declined to say if Qualcomm, which owns patents for mobile phones used by 103 million people worldwide, is talking
to China Mobile about the BREW standard.
Clearing House
Qualcomm is now giving BREW software to handset makers free of charge. Analysts said Qualcomm is trying to make the
standard pervasive among both CDMA and GSM operators before charging royalties.
``Qualcomm puts itself in a nice position, as a kind of central clearing house for paying companies that sell software and
applications to phone companies,'' said Mark Atkeson, a partner at Mobile Internet Asia Ltd., a venture capital firm that
invests in mobile data companies in China.
Every time a user pays for a game or a software downloaded onto the phone, Qualcomm and the phone operator each get a
10th of the revenue. The software company that developed the game keeps 80 percent, Atkeson said.
Shares of China Unicom Ltd., Unicom's publicly listed unit in Hong Kong, rose 0.7 percent to HK$7.80. |
