China's home-grown 3G standard gets Gov't approval

Stuart Corner
Monday, 23 January 2006 07:14

Business IT - Technology

The Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has approved China's home-grown 3G standard, TD-SCDMA as national technology standard for the telecommunication industry, according to a report from China's Xinhua news agency.

Xinhua reported the Ministry of Information Industry as saying that the technology was mature and ready for manufacturers to move ahead with production.

The news is likely to herald the eagerly awaited awarding of 3G licences in China. It is expected that licences will also be issued for the global WCDMA UMTS standard but generally believed that China would not award any licences for 3G until its home grown standard, which was initiated much later than WCDMA, was sufficiently mature to be able to compete. Extensive testing has been underway for the past year and reports coming out of China around mid 2005 suggested that some glitches remained.

The standard was developed by Datang Telecom and submitted to the International Telecom Union as a standard in 1997. Last September Zhou Huan, president of Datang Telecom Technology and Industry Group, was reported saying that TD-SCDMA would account for more than a third of China's 3G market.

With support from the Ministry of Information Industry, Datang and eight other companies formed a 3G research union. Currently 50 Chinese companies have joined the union to research in systems, chips, testing instruments and environments.

Meanwhile the Peoples Daily reports that China's Southeast University and Dongda Communication Co. have jointly developed the country's first chip for WCDMA mobile phones,.

China is also hopeful of selling TD-SCDMA technologies overseas and the Peoples Daily, citing sources within the company, said in November that China's major telecom equipment manufacturer ZTE had obtained a contract to build a TD-SCDMA test network in Romania.