Cautious About 3G Applications

TD-SCDMA Opportunity as 3G W-CDMA Falters

9th December 2002 by XINHUA NEWS AGENCY.

The slow progress of W-CDMA has opened a window of opportunity for TD-SCDMA to win wider industry support, the developer of the Chinese 3G (Third Generation) mobile standard of TD-SCDMA said.

Zhou Huan, chairman and president of Datang Technology and Industry Group, the major backer of the technology along with Germany's Siemens, made the remarks on the official daily newspaper of the ongoing International Telecommunications Union Asia 2002 conference Friday.

Zhou said the first field trial, which will cost 100 million US dollars, will kick off in the middle of next year, while the first commercial products will be available by the first half of 2004.

He said the opportunity comes from the halting performance to date of W-CDMA, which has been dogged by technical flaws and late arrival of handsets.

"So far there isn't a W-CDMA business model right here in the market, but mobile operators need to make a profit," he said.

"Spectrum is a non-regenerable assets and is very valuable for operators. TD-SCDMA has competitive advantages over the other two standards, in terms of spectrum utilization and infrastructure costs," he continued.

Datang and 17 companies, including Nokia, Taiwan province's DbTel and Texas Instrument, set up a 233 million US dollar joint- venture last year, called Commit, to produce chipsets for TD-SCDMA handsets. It is also working with Agilent Technology and Racom on the development of test and measurement tools for TD-SCDMA.

Datang's TD-SCDMA partner Siemens earlier said it has some 350 dedicated engineers working to commercialize the technology.

Zhou admitted Datang is looking for overseas capital to fund the commercialization of TD-SCDMA, but declined to give further details.

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