With the Beijing Olympics just around the corner, China is speeding up efforts to promote its home-grown 3G (third generation) standard TD-SCDMA.

As the test TD-SCDMA network in 10 Chinese cities has now been completed and with increasing participation of foreign and domestic companies, the government is preparing TD-SCDMA for its debut, in an effort to help it win a better position in the country's upcoming 3G arena.

"We have spent less than one year to build the TD-SCDMA test network in Shenyang and its coverage has reached 95 percent of the current 2G network in the city," said Guo Yingao, vice-president of China Mobile's arm in Liaoning province, whose capital Shenyang will hold some Olympic events.

"Although the network is still not perfect at the moment, it is ready for the Olympics," he added.

China Mobile was mandated to build TD-SCDMA trial networks since last year in 10 cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, and began the first public trial on April 1.

The battle of standards

China launched a plan to overhaul its telecom industry in May, in which the country's six telecom operators will be merged into three to provide both fixed-line and mobile services. It has promised to issue three 3G licenses as soon as the restructuring is completed.

It was reported that China Mobile would get the TD-SCDMA license while China Telecom and China Netcom will get theirs based on the WCDMA and CDMA2000 standards respectively.

The government hopes that by establishing the TD-SCDMA "test" network half to one year earlier than its other two rivals, the home-grown standard could have a better chance of succeeding in competing with WCDMA and CDMA2000, which were considered more mature.

However, the government's efforts to back the TD-SCDMA has long lacked support, especially from multinationals such as Nokia and Motorola, which were reluctant in releasing products based on the TD-SCDMA standard.

These companies have invested a lot in the other two standards and have already released related products.

The lack of support reached a climax in April when Kaiming Communication Co, one of the major TD-SCDMA chip production and research companies in China, went into bankruptcy after its shareholders such as Texas Instruments and Nokia had long been reluctant to continue their investment in the company.

After that, some news reports even said China's TD-SCDMA is in "Euthanasia", citing Li Shihe, former Datang Mobile chief scientist known as the "Father of TD-SCDMA".

Winds of change

Things have changed since one month ago, however, when China launched its new Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). Li Yizhong, minister of MIIT, said in July that the government would fully support the TD-SCDMA standard as much as the country backed the Shenzhou program, China's human spaceflight project that sent one Chinese crewmember into space in 2003.

(China Daily July 31, 2008)