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After years of delays in its 3G auctions, China is finally poised to unleash its wireless capex explosion, proving a much needed source of hope for the beleaguered industry and a possible $30bn spend next year alone.

Of course, when Chinese 3G was first mooted earlier this decade, its homegrown vendors did not present the powerful challenge to the mobile infrastructure majors that they do today, and the coming weeks will see a massive effort by all the suppliers to reap the rewards of years of R&D and partnership investment in the country.

The Chinese authorities are set to hand out three 3G licenses within a few weeks, and even possibly before the end of the year, opening the floodgates for a wave of infrastructure spending that could total almost $30bn in 2009 alone.

China Mobile, which received 3G spectrum early in return for supporting the local TD-SCDMA standard, and to build out in time for the Beijing Olympics, is already expanding its 3G networks and planning an early move to multimode GSM/TD-SCDMA/TD-LTE. It will receive its official national license for TD-SCDMA, while China Telecom will receive the CDMA2000 license and China Unicom the franchise for W-CDMA - probably the crown jewel, despite Mobile's headstart, because of the ready availability of equipment and devices.

Judging by how recent major 2G infrastructure contracts have been shared out, Chinese vendors Huawei and ZTE will be very hopeful of a large share of the 3G pie too, especially the former, whose offerings these days are fully capable of competing with those of the western vendors, on functionality as well as price, outside its own country. Huawei has made significant inroads into the European 3G market - experience that will be useful at home.

However, the other main 3G suppliers - Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia Siemens - are also expected to collect some business, while ALU, Nortel and Motorola could show up in the CDMA2000 deals. China's intense focus on telecoms at the Olympics highlighted how it has become a matter of national pride as well as economic necessity for the country to have world leading networks at last, and it will be looking to draw on the experience of a wide range of partners, as well as setting them off against one another in terms of pricing. All the majors have Chinese joint ventures geared to TD-SCDMA - where so far the Chinese suppliers have been the big winners - and to cultivating routes into the Chinese operators.

And what of the devices? Here, despite the presence of many local suppliers, Nokia is expected to be the major winner. It will be the non-Chinese first vendor to release TD-SCDMA handsets for China Mobile, and while it scarcely plays in the CDMA sector, its W-CDMA efforts will draw on its massive brand presence in China. A survey released this week showed that Nokia and Motorola have almost 90% smartphone market share between them, a situation that will hasten the expected fall-out among smaller native phonemakers. According to China's CCID Consulting, about 7.5m smartphones sold in China in the third quarter of 2008, accounting for 19.3% of total cellphone sales.

Meanwhile, the other great hope for wireless vendors in 2009, India, has finalized plans for its 3G and WiMAX auctions, with the former starting on January 16, and the latter commencing two days after the 3G sale is concluded.

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