Mainland 3G phone system fails trials
The mainland's home-grown third-generation (3G) mobile technology has suffered a major setback, after failing to yield satisfactory performances in comprehensive field trials designed to help the government determine its 3G licensing strategy.
The five-month, state-run trials indicated that Chinese 3G technology, TD-SCDMA, lags behind the two key foreign technologies in many performance categories and is far from ready for commercial use.
The initial results from trials, completed in September, were revealed for the first time at yesterday's 3G in China Global Summit 2004 in Beijing.
The conference was organised by the China Academy of Telecom Research of the Ministry of Information Industry, the unit that ran the full-scale trials on the three technologies that are being considered.
The failure may prompt the government to further delay the issue of 3G licences if it decides to wait until the home-grown system is ready.
It may also affect how the ministry determines standards and how many licences are to be granted.
Before the research academy released any primary trial findings, the market had widely expected Beijing to announce its licensing decision by the middle of next year.
A research academy source said the field trials had indicated that TD-SCDMA technology would need additional testing before it could conclude if the technology was fit for commercial launch.
The latest trials were supposed to be the last round of three years of testing to help the ministry formulate its licensing strategy.
Academy researcher Xu Xiayan refused to say if TD-SCDMA is mature enough for general usage.
'The trials showed that TD-SCDMA technology had made significant improvements, and laid very good foundations for further development,' Mr Xu said.
However, other officials from the research agency and operators involved in the trials said the other two 3G systems - WCDMA, based on Europe's GSM technology, and CDMA2000, a next generation mobile platform based on the CDMA standard in use in the United States - yielded satisfactory results, confirming that both are fit for commercial operation.
By contrast, several parts of TD-SCDMA failed to achieve the functionalities required under the trials.
Key problems included lack of workable handsets, dubious stability and poor reliability of TD-SCDMA's core network.
Only one TD-SCDMA handset - a prototype produced by Datang Mobile, a unit of Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Group - was available for trial, compared to 17 WCDMA handset models and seven models with CDMA2000 technology.
State-owned Datang Group, the advocate of China's 3G system, is not expected to produce its first commercial TD-SCDMA mobile phone until June next year at the earliest.
Its joint-venture company with Philips and Samsung Electrics, T3G, will not be able to produce a complete TD-SCDMA chipset until the middle of next year.
