BEIJING-A story in the Chinese language Economic Daily on 27 June analyzed the advantages of CDMA, but none had anything to do with benefits for end users. China Unicom’s CDMA network started commercial operations on 8 January, almost six months ago but has managed to attract only around 1 million customers.
The newspaper report contended that building a CDMA network is useful because it better manages spare spectrum resources compared with GSM, it broke the monopoly of the GSM standard, and 18 of the 19 authorized manufacturers are domestic enterprises, which could gain market share at the expense of foreign suppliers by offering CDMA handsets. Moreover, China Unicom had to rely on CDMA to compete with dominant mobile operator China Mobile, which only offers GSM services.
Customers are better off, the story concluded, because CDMA offers high-grade service and the luxury of choice. The introduction of CDMA 1x later this year, will allow Unicom to offer higher data rates and new services, such as audio and video downloads, online games and e-mail.
But until then, Chinese subscribers remain unconvinced that a switch to CDMA is worth the effort.
