Shift to new phone tech will be fast: Nortel chief
Dec 5 2000 5:46PM
Homeway
The Chinese mainland will be able to move quickly from the transitional 2.5-generation to the third-generation (3G) mobile phone technology, said Robert Y.L. Mao, president and chief executive officer of Nortel Networks China, China Daily reports.
The 3G is expected to be widely applied on the mainland in the second half of 2002 or 2003, Mao said Monday at the International Telecommunications Union Telecom Asia 2000 conference and exhibition.
The main driver behind the rapid development would be the similar worldwide trend, with network operators being eager to recover the massive cost of obtaining the licenses to run the networks.
The anticipated greater competition in the telecom sector after China's entry into the World Trade Organization would also press domestic players to move forward with the new technology, Mao said.
Nortel is planning to launch a 3G network in Spain next summer, Mao said.
A high-capacity network is crucial to a network operator, since value-added services, instead of traditional voice services, would be the main revenue source.
The network also has to be flexible since the investment is bound to be huge and the revenue model of 3G services remains unclear.
Mao believes that all the 3G standards, which are TD-SCDMA, WCDMA and CDMA 2000, will be applied on the mainland, because by covering different frequencies, they can meet the huge demand for the resource.
Nortel has launched a experimental GPRS network, the so-called 2.5G solution, in Tianjin in collaboration with China Mobile, the mainland's No 1 wireless operator.
Nortel announced Monday a contract with China Netcom Corp to build a 1,600-gigabit optical network from Shenzhen to Hong Kong.
The network will serve as an international gateway for China Netcom's packet-based network and will carry Internet Protocol voice, video and data traffic between Shenzhen and Hong Kong from early next year.
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