Asia Pacific Watch

November 6, 2002
China favours domestic 3G standard TD-SCDMA

CHINA -- The Chinese Government has opted to give concrete technical support to the domestically developed TD-SCDMA (time-division synchronous code-division multiple access), a 3G mobile communication technology, widely expected to be the next big thing in the mobile communications business. And China's Datang Telecom and German giant Siemens are likely to come out major winners.

According to Zhou Huan, president of Datang, the government has allocated broader spectrum resources for TD-SCDMA, a 3G technology developed by Datang, rather than for those developed by European and American companies.

Accordingly, Datang is set to become another Qualcomm, the US-based core technology owner of CDMA technology that became rich by collecting licensing fees from vendors and carriers. Siemens, a major partner of Datang, will also reap profits from users of TD-SCDMA technology.

After investing over 200 million euros ($203 million) in TD-SCDMA over the last few years, Siemens announced last week that it will sink another 50 million euros ($50.8 million) into the development of TD-SCDMA.

Beside China-based TD-SCDMA, the other two 3G technologies are the European-developed WCDMA (wideband CDMA) and CDMA2000, nurtured by Qualcomm. The government's spectrum allocation, which is very favorable for TD-SCDMA, paved a golden way for Datang and Siemens, Zhou said.

"China's mobile telecom market will no longer be a playground for overseas companies in the coming 3G age," said Zhang Guobao, deputy minister of the State Development Planning Commission. He said that with the adoption of the domestically invented technology, China will no longer pay billions of dollars in licensing fees to overseas core technology owners.

To hurry up TD-SCDMA's commercialization, Datang kicked off an alliance with seven other telecom vendors to produce sets of TD-SCDMA equipment. The seven other members of the alliance include Soutec, Huali, Huawei, Legend, ZTE, China Electronics Corp. and China Putian, who are chipmakers, mobile phone vendors and network equipment makers. China Mobile and China Unicom, the country's dual mobile carriers, attended the launching ceremony of the industry alliance.

India technology planners and carriers will do well to take a closer look at TD-SCDMA, which not only is backward compatible to GSM, but is also considered the most spectrally efficient 3G technology. A TDD technology, it uses smart antennas that adapt to the changing conditions by analyzing the uplink signal from the terminal to the base station in order to determine its position. This information is used to adapt and transmit the downlink signal to the terminal. Besides, the uplink and downlink occur in the same frequency band in TD-SCDMA. Since radio signals are strongly affected by the frequency at which they operate, the measurements made in the uplink in a TDD system can be efficiently used for the downlink.