BEIJING-Zhou Huan, chairman and president of the Datang Telecom Technology Group, told Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post that China should back its home-grown third-generation (3G) standard, TD-SCDMA.
“As the United States government supports the CDMA standard and Europe supports GSM, our government should back TD-SCDMA. … We should stick to our standard; we should only adopt TD-SCDMA,” he said. Zhou Huan added that TD-SCDMA is more advanced than W-CDMA and cdma2000.
Datang developed TD-SCDMA in cooperation with Germany’s Siemens.
But not everybody is so upbeat.
The deputy head of the Delegation of the European Commission in Beijing, Franz Jenssen, called for one integrated standard worldwide, dismissing the Chinese standard. According to Li Ming, head of Zhongxing Telecommunications (ZTE)’s network division, TD-SCDMA is late to market, hindering its development.
The South China Morning Post quoted expectations of the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) for 3G market splits in 2006. W-CDMA would account for 65 percent to 70 percent, cdma2000 for 20 percent and TD-SCDMA for the remaining 10 percent to 15 percent.
Meanwhile, outgoing Minister of Information Industry Wu Jichuan told a press conference at the International Telecommunication Union’s Telecom Asia 2002 Conference in Hong Kong that China would delay granting 3G licenses until the technology is fully developed and market demand is adequate. But he added that China’s operators will be free to choose the standard to use.
No major developments are expected until March next year, when China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), appoints a new government, including a new minister of information industry, which most probably will be the newly appointed communist party secretary at the ministry, Wang Xudong. The NPC session is also expected to approve the long-delayed Telecommunications Law.
