China's 3G strategy revealed

SPEAKING AS China Mobile revealed its latest results, CEO, Wang Jianzhou, seems to have revealed China's strategy for 3G. And his company will get lumbered with TD-SCDMA.

Unfortunately, although TD-SCDMA is China's own home-grown 3G technology, Mr Wang admitted, "Compared to other 3G technologies, TD-SCDMA is still a few years behind."

Meanwhile, following the recent reshuffle of telecoms companies, China Unicom looks as if it will get a licence to build a W-CDMA 3G network while China Telecom is almost certainly to build out its 3G network using CDMA2000 technology.

The catch is that China Mobile doesn't really need a licence to get cracking. It has already built eight, and acquired another two, 'trial' TD-CDMA networks. It is expecting to increase that number to 38 by June 2009.

Wang revealed that infrastructure equipment for this 'second phase' of the network will probably be ordered in October [2008]. It's extremely unlikely that a non-Chinese manufacturer – say Nokia Siemens Networks – will get any of the orders.

The China Mobile Group has already spent around Yuan 15 billion on the first phase of the TD-SCDMA network.

Mr Wang's gripes about consumer reaction to TD-SCDMA are predictable. There's not enough choice of handsets and those that exist are slow and relatively expensive.

It is just possible that China Mobile may be permitted to build two 3G networks – with a W-CDMA network alongside the existing TD-SCDMA network.

It depends on how far behind the rest of the world the Chinese government is prepared to let the country lag, just to nurture its own technology. µ