Chinese officials may wait until next year to award licenses for third-generation technology, according to a prediction by market research firm iSuppli Corp. The firm said that recent setbacks in testing TD-SCDMA technology-the country’s homegrown 3G technology-may cause the Chinese government to hold off on granting 3G licenses until the technology is ready.
iSuppli’s forecasts follow a report in China Daily that TD-SCDMA did not fair well in recent tests. According to the report, the chips in TD-SCDMA phones did not perform as expected.
“The decision makers in Beijing now face an awkward choice: Either they can give up on the indigenous TD-SCDMA standard, or they can delay the timetable yet again until the specification is robust and ready,” iSuppli’s Byron Wu wrote.
Many in the industry expected Beijing to issue four 3G licenses this year, although the licensing timetable has been continually delayed for several years. Such licenses represent a major opportunity for phone and gear vendors, as China is the world’s largest wireless market. iSuppli now forecasts that 3G licenses will be awarded next year. The firm said China will have 34 million 3G subscribers by 2009-and that only 30 percent will be TD-SCDMA users.
In other Asian 3G news:
c Lucent Technologies Inc. said it completed a High-Speed Downlink Packet Access field trail in Shanghai using China Netcom’s W-CDMA network.
c Nortel Networks Ltd. announced it conducted a voice and data handoff between a W-CDMA network and an 802.11 network in Japan with BB Mobile, a subsidiary of Softbank that is vying for a mobile license in the country. Nortel conducted other UMTS/HSDPA trials with BB Mobile earlier this month.
c And Vibo Telecom in Taiwan will use gear from Motorola Inc. for its UMTS/HSDPA network upgrade.
