China Should Adopt Technology Neutrality for 3G Services

Talking about the development of 3G services in China, Qualcomm's President for Greater China, Frank Meng Pu has said in an interview that there should be scope for additional platforms in the country "based on the principle of technology neutrality" which encourages market competition to drive 3G development.

He argued in an interview with the South China Morning Post that the technology can thrive on its own if the market was left to select which technologies they wanted for their 3G networks.

China Mobile is currently trialling the TD-SCDMA format and has plans to expand the current 10 city network to 28 cities in the near future. It is generally accepted that the company will be forced to use the TD-SCDMA format for its commercial 3G network, when the licenses are eventually awarded.

The government should open the market. Operators know how to drive the technology under market competition," said Mr Meng, adding that if the government really wanted to help TD-SCDMA become stronger, other systems should not be blocked. "The technology will improve when it competes with others. Just like the competition between CDMA and GSM is driving the improvement of these two technologies," Mr Meng said.

China Unicom is expected to go down the WCDMA route, while China Telecom - which recently brought Unicom's CDMA network - is expected to follow a CDMA evolution path.

China Telecom is planning a huge spending program to build up its CDMA network to compete with China Mobile, and is expected to lay the groundwork for CDMA evolution as it rolls out an expanded network. The mobile operator currently has about 100,000 base stations, compared to over 300,000 for China Mobile. China Telecom's rollout plan will also benefit from a recent decision to force the operators to share their towers - enabling Telecom to effectively demand access to China Mobile's existing network infrastructure.

China Telecommunications Corp., the parent company of Hong Kong listed China Telecom recently confirmed that it has formally awarded a CDMA tender, estimated to be worth as much as US$1.5 billion. This initial contract is a prelude to a predicted much larger network infrastructure tender, thought to be worth upwards of US$10 billion.

"The CDMA technology can enable China Telecom to deploy the CDMA EV-DO service by only changing some equipment in existing base stations, and then the company can immediately start providing 3G services," added Mr Meng.

On the web: South China Morning Post

Updated on 29th Oct.

Clarified the headline and opening paragraph based on feedback from press relations office on behalf of Qualcomm.

Posted to the site on 28th October 2008