Don't know if you have been following the Nokia thread, but there are a number of good, recent discussions concerning China Unicom.
To suggest that "CDMA will own China" is sweeping and premature, IMHO. China Unicom is by no means the dominant player in the country's mobile telecom market. The big gun is China Telecom, and it is a GSM/TDMA operator. For numbers, look through the Nokia thread. There are reasons, economic and technical, to believe that for 2G/2.5G at least, GSM will continue to proliferate since there are no significant advantages to users to switch to CDMA. As far as new users are concerned, they'll probably pick the cheapest phones / plan, and my guess is that GSM operators have the advantage there since they have been in the market longer and will have depreciated much more of their capital costs than will have operators with newly installed CDMA equipment.
Furthermore, there are actually two CDMA standards being prepared for 3G, namely, CDMA 2000, which is QCOM's and WCDMA, which is supported by Nokia and Ericsson. So, who knows which one will eventually prevail in China. Nokia is already very established in the country and I expect it to be pushing for WCDMA when the time is right.
Finally, even China Unicom operates a GSM network, and as long as it continues to make money for them, I think they'll stick with it. So, why CDMA (specifically, QCOM's CDMA) in the first place? I have found at least two reasons: 1) to placate the US so that China can enter the WTO; and 2) money from QCOM (apparently Q is funding China Unicom's buildup of its CDMA network--not sure how that works exactly).
"QCOM makes it sound like its a done deal..." Well, what can one expect? I'm not criticizing QCOM here, but I am saying that it is to the company's advantage to paint a rosy picture. Even if the deal were really done, it remains to be seen how quickly China Unicom will build its network and switch over from GSM. |
