The chairman of Qualcomm, the pioneer of commercial CDMA (code division multiple access) cellular phone services, will address a conference in Beijing later this month as part of the company's promotion of a cellular standard now used by almost two million subscribers worldwide.
Irwin Jacobs, one of the co-founders of Qualcomm, will address a CDMA conference tailored for the China mobile and wireless market, organised by Unicom, MPT and Great Wall.
Hong Kong's Hutchison Telecom was the first operator to launch a commercial CDMA service in 1995, with other operators taking on the technology in Korea, the United States, Indonesia, Burma, India, Russia and South America.
CDMA has been adopted by 1.4 million subscribers in Korea, but the rest of Asia is dominated by European-developed TDMA (time division multiple access) standard GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications).
GSM, which has a higher penetration because it entered the market sooner and because its technology is more mature, expects to have 50 million subscribers by the end of the year.
GSM standards have already been adopted in more than 107 countries.