China Telecom ---
John,
Telecom will receive a license - but I think it will be a 3G license.
There's certainly little logic for Telecom to consider GSM/GPRS/EDGE <ggg>/wCDMA evolution, if, for no other reason, there is precious little applicable spectrum left. Unicom will max out its GSM spectrum with 50M lines - and they have over 35M subscribers now. Mobile is in the same boat - which may explain their limited interest in GPRS - they recently announced plans for additional GPRS lines for a total of 2M - about 2% of their networks - at a time when all other GSM carriers have upgraded wholesale.
Mobile may well feel a serious spectrum pinch before they realize their 3G dreams. Unicom, of course has cdma, 1x capacity doubling, doubling atop of that, and 1xMAP for ailing GSM networks.
I think Telecom will be required to wait to progress directly to 3G.
China MIII would like Telecom to champion TD-SCDMA, which is, at best, a pig in a poke at present. Also, reports suggest that it is only appropriate - provided it works at all - for dense urban applications - and unlikely for general application within China's vast provinces...
I think Telecom will be forced to work with TD_SCDMA where applicable, which probably implies wCDMA elsewhere, with hopes of multimode compatibility between the two 3GPP standards... This would render Telecom with an extreme liability from which they might never recover....
However, I hope you're right....
Perhaps Q will announce a cdma2000/TD-SCDMA chipset.
<g> |
