All three carriers must work to boost TD-SCDMA, says China
Published: 8 January, 2010
READ MORE: China | China Mobile | TD-SCDMA
China's roll-out of three 3G networks provided much needed resilience to an otherwise depressed mobile infrastructure market in 2009, but the country's government still wants its operators to work harder and spend more.
The government has called on the three carriers - China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom - to speed up deployment of 3G, which so far has seen low levels of uptake. In a meeting with the carriers and local vendor Datang Telecom, vice premier Zhang Deijang also demanded better information security and a strengthened TD-SCDMA ecosystem according to the Xinhua News service.
The reports say Zhang asked all three carriers to help with further R&D into TD-SCDMA, the homegrown 3G standard used by China Mobile, and to lend their weight to strengthening its device ecosystem. Although Unicom and Telecom are using alternative 3G systems (W-CDMA and CDMA2000 respectively), the government believes they still have a national duty to boost the Chinese platform, so that it can become a world player.
The Chinese authorities have clung to their dream of making TD-SCDMA a global standard long after this looked unlikely to happen. The platform has made an appearance in France Telecom trials and a couple of minor economies, but is far behind the main two 3G standards in device availability, economies of scale and reliability. Even China Mobile aims to escape its clutches as quickly as possible with an early move to TD-LTE (which does have a genuine chance of being global), while its two rivals are unlikely to give more than the most grudging support to boosting a competitive technology. Their best chance of narrowing Mobile's market lead is exploiting its difficulties with TD-SCDMA by offering stronger, cheaper 3G services themselves.
Zhang added that 3G technology had the potential to revolutionize China's economic development, modernize traditional industries and boost the development of technology markets.
So far, the three carriers have CNY160.9bn ($23.6bn) to deploy 325,000 3G base stations in the major cities. China Mobile said it had reached its revised year-end target of 5m 3G subscribers, but had fallen far short of its initial goal of 10m by the end of 2009. The company hopes to increase this base by 30m during 2010. Analysts expect China's 3G market to be worth CNY7.4bn in 2010 - four times its value in 2009 - as the number of 3G users grows sixfold.
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