China’s homegrown technology known as TD-SCDMA is creeping up from the industry’s subconscious as it attracts more resources and quiet maneuvers from major players.
The Chinese government recently allocated the 2.3 GHz and 2.4 GHz bands to Time Division Duplex, where TD-SCDMA is expected to operate.
With that allocation, wireless players are coming around to the idea that value propositions do not lie in cdma2000 1x, GSM/GPRS and W-CDMA alone, but in the vast economic potential that the technology could generate in the huge Chinese market and other parts of the world, including Europe and North America.
Still in its development stage, industry experts have praised the technology’s strength, while exercising caution as to its efficiency and ability to create a large market.
“The allocation by the Chinese government gave reality to whether it will make it to the market,” remarked David Murashige, vice president of marketing at Nortel Networks. “It will make its presence known in the next several years.”
Chinese vendor Datang Mobile Communications Equipment has said it expects the technology to be commercial in 2004 and has promised to spend up to US$120 million to develop it this year. Datang recently established a joint venture with Philips Electronics and Samsung Electronics to deliver TD-SCDMA chipsets and reference designs for handset makers and cellular-phone design houses.
STMicroelectronics also announced an agreement to license Datang with key know-how and intellectual property rights for the technology. InterDigital Technology said it has licensed subsidiary Hop-On Wireless to develop, manufacture and sell wireless devices for TD-SCDMA, as well as other protocols.
Nokia, Nortel Networks, Lucent Technologies and Ericsson all have said they are paying increasing attention to it. Siemens said it will spend US$50 million on TD-SCDMA this year alone. California-based UTStarcom entered a partnership with Datang to develop and promote the standard and provide a complete 3GPP R4 compliant end-to-end TD-SCDMA solution.
Still exactly how the technology holds up against the more dominant W-CDMA and cdma2000 technologies is beginning to generate industry debate.
Robert Sanchez, vice president and chief technology officer at InCode Telecom, described it as more efficient than both technologies because it takes advantage of the strengths of both, especially with the use of TDD.
“It’s a powerful technology,” he said. “It accommodates the best of both worlds.”
Murashige is cautious. “We have to be careful,” he noted. “We’ve been involved in different standards in the past, and most of the claims are often overstated and inaccurate.”
Sanchez explained that, unlike cdma2000 and UMTS, it has both forward and reverse link, using one channel to send and receive data. This makes it spectrally efficient, he said.
It combines the strength of CDMA in terms of maximizing capacity and minimizing interference. With TDD it uses time slots to ensure smooth traffic between the mobile base station and mobile terminals or devices, said Sanchez. He said TD-SCDMA needs new software to enable it to work on GSM networks and will have to get at least 1.6 GHz of spectrum, a little more than 1x.
He said TDD adds some special qualities to TD-SCDMA and they include what he called joint detection, which enables it to take energy from different signals and make them into one signal. The second advantage is its ability to synchronize activities between base stations and mobile stations. He added that it also incorporates smart antennas, which enable it to steer energy to where it is needed without interference.
Murashige noted that TDD is allocated at different bands in Europe and China. In Europe, it is at the 1.8 GHz, 1.9 GHz and 2.0 GHz bands in contrast with 2.3 GHz and 2.4 GHz in China. In comparing the two technologies, he said its benefits will depend on what the operators want to trade off, adding that it provides a different cost structure from 1x and W-CDMA. Nokia spokeswoman Ritta Mard said her company is looking at it for local area coverage and hot spots.
“It is best suited for big-city environments, ” said Rose Miller, director of business development for China at Lucent.
Murashige said operators will have to make a choice as to what kind of user to focus on between nomadic and fixed, or mobile users in cars, trains and other mobile activities.
“We will have to wait a while for the technology to reach maturity level,” he said. GW
