World divides into camps over the merits of rival US and European wireless platforms

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Published: 12:00am, 16 Jun 2001

Asia's network operators have drawn battle lines between two technology platforms that are driving the expansion of third-generation (3G) wireless communications in the region.

This was the message left at the end of the sixth annual 3G World Congress in Hong Kong yesterday. Network operators and system vendors revealed an emerging 3G world divided into two camps - those behind the United States-developed Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology and those supporting Europe's Global System for Mobile (GSM) standard.

Neil Montefiore, chief executive at Singapore-based mobile operator M1, drew first blood when he revealed on Thursday that the company was scrapping its second-generation cdmaOne network in favour of the GSM-evolved Wideband-CDMA 3G platform. M1 had planned to drop its CDMA network ahead of the Singapore Government's decision to take back the frequency spectrum it was operating on by the end of this year.

'We have experienced so many problems with the CDMA network,' he said. The decision to switch to W-CDMA was hastened by the inability of vendors to show their timetable for handsets and networks. He also said that setting up the W-CDMA system would cost M1 only about S$500 million (about HK$2.14 billion), compared with more than S$1 billion if it chose CDMA2000.

As of May, there were 537 million GSM subscribers worldwide, accounting for about 70 per cent of the digital cellular wireless market. China is expected to record about 100 million GSM users by the end of this year.

However, the system rivalry did not dampen the enthusiasm of 12 CDMA carriers who signed international roaming pacts with China Unicom, the mainland's second-biggest mobile telephone company, months before the Chinese operator is to start operating its cdmaOne network. China Unicom will start operations this October and move its network - worth up to 60 million subscribers by 2005 - to 3G using CDMA2000.

Among those who signed roaming deals with China Unicom were Hutchison Telecom, which launched the world's first cdmaOne system in 1995, and SK Telecom, which started the world's first commercial 3G service using CDMA2000 last October.