Believe it or not, China is said to be about to announce its 3G licences. This has been expected for about three years now. State radio is saying that the restructuring of the country’s telecoms industry might be announced in the next few weeks.
It’s been a long time coming. The government gave people to expect that 3G telephony would be deployed at the Olympics Games. That must have been a misunderstanding. Clearly it was the announcement of the 3G licences which was to be expected before the Games.
The China government would naturally prefer to see its own national 3G standard, TD-SCDMA occupy a big part of the country's 3G infrastructure rather than infrastructure based on foreign-backed standards.
However the China government is mindful that the WTO is expecting it to offer licenses to companies offering other 3G standards, like the US-backed (Qualcomm) standard CDMA 2000, and the European-backed WCDMA.
The China government has been running TD-SCDMA trials in nine cities, some of which are hosting the games. They are home to some 80 million people. Networks for the nine cities cost about $4 billion.
At the same time, it is reported that the China government is expecting to spend some $7bn on Wimax infrastructure over the next two to three years, and some infrastructure manufacturers are urging the China government to bypass 3G in favour of a Wimax-based 4G approach.
Will China go for WiMAX? "It depends on who owns the IP", reckons NXP’s CTO Rene Penning de Vries, "no one wants a company which owns 60 per cent of the IP of any system."
So no one is holding their breath in the expectation of big 3G license wins for CDMA 2000 technology.
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