To accentuate his point, utterred in Mandarin he said thet while many people had different opinions on this, the only one that counted was his.
An incredibly arrogant and stupid thing to say because there is absolutely no way that China can support the standard on its own. The trade war a dumb move like the one you suggest might happen would be incredible.
Sounds like the Chinese are getting set to whine like fleet of 747s as they see how much Q is going to make out of CDMA.
Who's going to do TD-SCDMA's infra, which is challenging? Who's going to do handsets?
C'mon, you know better than to spread that kind of BS around.
telecomasia.net
Showtime for TD-SCDMA
TD-SCDMA, the Chinese-backed standard that promises 3G performance at lower cost and higher efficiency, is almost a reality. But with the industry worldwide in retreat, Beijing is struggling to find cash and support
The clock is running down on China's own 3G standard, TD-SCDMA. After three years of joint development between state-owned Datang and Siemens, the mobile standard is about to meet a series of crucial technology and financial milestones.
If TD-SCDMA delivers technically as promised, and Datang wins the industry support it is seeking, the rewards could be huge. Danish mobile chipset designer RTX estimates that as early as 2004, TD-SCDMA could outstrip W-CDMA systems in unit sales.
But to get even in the ballpark of that optimistic prediction means Datang will have to go where no Chinese technology firm has ventured before. It is going to have to knit together a global community of TD-SCDMA backers and manufacturers, find up to $3 billion in funding, and convince many of the world's operators that the standard is at least as good as W-CDMA.
In doing this, Datang will be encroaching on, if not actually invading, the fiercely-protected turf of the world's vendor giants. As Qualcomm, the CDMA developer, can testify, it's a dangerous place to be.
Yet TD-SCDMA has strengths of its own, in particular, the support of China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII). MII backing has taken the standard to where it is today, as one of the five IMT-2000 standards and recognized by the 3GPP.
The latest MII spectrum management plan is likely to confirm that support. The new plan, not yet released as Wireless Asia went to press, is expected to explicitly set aside 2 GHz frequencies for TD-SCDMA, along with spectrum for W-CDMA and cdma2000, with the clear implication it will issue TD-SCDMA licenses.
Standalone or add-on
And TD-SCDMA has some undoubted technology strengths. It can map directly on to GSM networks. It can be deployed in the unpaired spectrum bands held by virtually all European and many Asian operators. It can be a standalone 3G system or an add-on to a W-CDMA network in a hotspot, or it can be deployed in rural or semi-rural locations.
Thanks to the smart antenna technology developed by Datang, it can run on a much smaller slice of spectrum - 1.6 MHz, compared with 5 MHz used by W-CDMA and the original European version of TDD, known as UTRA. It also uses a much lower chiprate, 1.28 Mcps as against 3.84 Mcps, significantly reducing the power consumption and development cost. TD-SCDMA also boasts joint, or multi-user, detection, where instead of trying to locate a single user as base stations have been traditionally designed to do, they will track multiple users at once.
But time is not on TD-SCDMA's side. Datang vice president Yang Yi-gang says other standards have a three-to-five year headstart. He cheerfully admits the delay in implementing commercial W-CDMA is a certain opportunity for his company.
The slowdown in W-CDMA rollouts and the wariness over the 3G business model all play well towards the TD-SCDMA pitch, which stresses flexibility, cost and spectrum efficiency.
But the standard has a long way to go. The first operator trial won't take place until the end of the year, when the MII expects to run TD-SCDMA and W-CDMA trials in parallel, and commercial networks are unlikely before 2004.
At present, TD-SCDMA is the subject of field trials in Beijing. Datang's high profile chairman Zhou Huan has hailed the results of the master trial in February, which delivered coverage across a radius of 16 kilometers and at mobile user speeds of up to 125 km per hour. Datang aims to improve that to more than 30 kilometers and 250 km/h.
Chairman Zhou said the performance proved that "the design of the entire TD-SCDMA system is correct. Not just the standard, but the entire proposal".
In particanlor, that test proved the effectiveness of the Datang version of TD-SCDMA, using the 1.6 MHz carrier, and dispelled the reputation from TDD UTRA, which had a smaller radius and allowed for much slower speeds.
Obviously, this is all being driven by Chinese industrial policy. In the last two decades the government has astutely leveraged the country's market potential to establish joint ventures with all of the world's major equipment suppliers. Hands-on industrial policy is a common approach in north-east Asia; Korea's electronics and Japan's auto industries grew out of export-oriented government nurturing. In telecoms, China is following Korea's lead in strategically adopting CDMA in the early 1990s, and Japan's early implementation of W-CDMA.
The vehicle-bearer for the policy is Datang, a sprawling state-owned group whose name "Great Tang" evokes an illustrious Chinese dynasty. It is essentially several divisions of the Chinese Academy of Telecommunications Technology (CATT), of which Zhou Huan is Dean.
The group makes everything from optical switches to microwave radios to short message center platforms. It owns a listed company, Datang Telecom Technology Co Ltd, which reported RMB 2.051 billion ($248 million) in sales in 2001.
Not quite Qualcomm
An obvious comparison is Qualcomm, which used to make both phones and network equipment, but whose prime business now is in designing and licensing core chip technologies.
Datang rejects the comparison. In a recent China Central TV discussion, Zhou said the company "adopt[s] an open attitude, which means that we will not maintain our monopolization and governing degree only by selling the patent as Qualcomm did".
Not only is Datang spurning the Qualcomm business model, it is also avoiding the American company's strategic mistake of trying to go it alone as it took on the might of the global vendor community.
Datang has taken up with a major supplier, Siemens, and its technology complements the most popular standard, GSM, rather than trying to take it out of business.
Indeed, another strength of TD-SCDMA is its flexibility in the marketplace. It can be applied in three scenarios: either as standalone 3G, as evolution from GSM, or as a complement to W-CDMA.
But the big hurdle is a lack of handsets. It needs to bring phone-makers into the picture fast. It needs to bring phone-makers into the picture fast - both to provide attractive terminals and to share the heavy product development costs. Datang's Yang says it will cost another $2-$3 billion - clearly more than the company can find on its own.
At this stage no major phone-maker has committed to making TD-SCDMA product.
The current trials are using phones with chipsets produced by Texas Instruments.
"The device side definitely needs international co-operation," says Siemens' China president Peter Borger. "Most [vendors] have had job cuts, especially in America, so there are limitations in the resources available."
One tangible sign of support is a $28 million venture formed in February, backed by 17 companies, including Texas Instruments, Nokia China, LG Electronics and Taiwan's dbTel. The firm will make multimedia chipsets and solutions, with TD-SCDMA one of its priorities. Its name, ironically enough, is Commit.
In a separate deal, Datang has hooked up with Philips to make modem chipsets. A Beijing electronics firm, CECW, which was planning to make the handsets, has withdrawn from the arrangement.
Although the companies signed a letter of intent last September, this is still no more than "a R&D partnership", according to Adrian Chu, Philips' general manager for the Asia-Pacific communications segment. He said he expected the work would be completed in the third quarter. The agreement does provide for the establishment of a new JV, but at this stage nothing has been finalized.
This is where Datang's task is difficult. To date, it has spent RMB 500 million ($60.5 million) on TD-SCDMA development, and will spend that much again this year. That's a lot of cash even if most it came from the MII. As Zhou has pointed out, development of W-CDMA involved some of the world's biggest companies who deployed 50,000 engineers onto the project. Datang by contrast has a few hundred engineers.
So, what does it take to get phone makers to support TD-SCDMA? In classic technology industry strategy, the aim is to get critical mass, and the China market is the key.
Yang is banking on the publication of the new spectrum plan. "This will show to the world the level of commitment to TD-SCDMA in China and will convince them of its potential," he said.
If TD-SCDMA takes off in China, observes Borger, "none of the big companies can stay outside - otherwise they would lose market share". Philips' Chu agress.
"A lot of handset makers are interested in TD-SCDMA because it is a Chinese-developed standard backed by the government. So I think the interest is there," he said. "Just how much interested we really don't know."
Zhou knows he has to move now.
"The standard of a generation can dominate for 15 to 20 years," he said. "If we can't make this standard a reality this time, there will not be the same opportunity for another 20 years."
Even the Chinese have their doubts about TD-SCDMA:
tdscdma-forum.org
To some extent, standard is only a beginning although it is very important. Standard is only a series of criteria and totally open, which itself cannot create profit. What can really bring profits is a series of patents during the process of the industrialization of the standard. So if TD-SCDMA wants to surpass other 3G standards, it's very important to realize its industrialization as soon as possible. ¡¡¡¡
But the process of the industrialization of TD-SCDMA is disappointing. Especially compared with the other two standards, the developing speed of TD-SCDMA is obviously laggard. There are two reasons. One is because that TD-SCDMA just born not long ago. TD-SCDMA only exists for about two years but other standards has developed for six to eight years, so TD-SCDMA is certainly not as mature as the other two standards. The second reason, which also is the most important one is that at present, there is few people support TC-SCDMA. For example, there are more than ten companies participating in the research of WCDMA and investing tens of billion dollars, in which only the investment of Ericsson is three to five billion dollars. But in fact only Datang Group supports TD-SCDMA with the exception of the confederation of Seimens and Datang Group, and most of the other companies are still looking on, and moreover there is one billion RMB investment in total.
What makes most companies take onlooking attitude to TD-SCDMA? Is it because that there are really some problems with TD-SCDMA in technology or that Datang Group intends to possess this standard itself, not willing to share with other companies. According to the information from companies, the real reason is because of frequency planning. Both of EU and U.S.A have allotted frequency to WCDMA and CDMA2000 at very early time, but till now, China government still has no frequency planning for 3G standards including TD-SCDMA. Without frequency, no matter how excellent the standard is, no company will invest on it. The thought of most companies is that they prefer to invest on the other two standards, which have had frequency and must be used in the future rather than adventure TD-SCDMA. So many domestic companies including Huawei and ZTE have invested a lot of money in the research of WCDMA and CDMA2000 but are especially cautious to the investment on TD-SCDMA. ¡¡¡¡
Frequency is resource belonging to the government and is not producible and very rare. So it's very difficult for the government to carry out frequency planning. Although TD-SCDMA has become one of the three international standards of 3G, the government still can't make sure whether TD-SCDMA has matured in technology or not, since at present, there are no mature switch, base station and terminal equipment, and all the experiments are only carried through in lab. So the attitude of the government is that the key issue for TD-SCDMA is to get mature and launch its own equipments as soon as possible. ¡¡¡¡
Such situation is very difficult for Datang Group. The principal of TD-SCDMA Forum said directly that depending on existing a few companies, it's very difficult to compete with the other two standards, which own much more supporters, and without the support of government, it's almost impossible to realize rapid development of TD-SCDMA within a short time only depending on Datang Group and Seimens.
It seems that both of the government and Datang Group have there own position, but in the eyes of others, TD-SCDMA almost cannot survive from the point of view of the government. The earning from sale of Datang Group in a year is only three billion dollars. And although Seimens is very strong, it will not only focus on TD-SCDMA and in fact, it also participates in the research of WCDMA and CDMA2000 at the same time.
So with such comparison, the situation is very difficult for TD-SCDMA |
