TD-SCDMA - China’s chance

TD-SCDMA (3G) mobile technology has enormous potential in the largest mobile market in the world, with sales of over five million handsets a month.

China has no wish to be dependent on Western technology, and this has led to investment in the new standard. TD-SCDMA enables the rapid spread of telecommunications to thinly populated areas, and the broad transmission bandwidth also provides access to the Internet.

As the mobile world waits for the Chinese authorities to award between two and five 3G licences in the next months, Klaus Ahlbeck, Business Development Director at RTX Telecom, anticipates that the TDSCDMA standard will become a key technology for the Chinese. Currently, only four or five companies in the world are familiar with the third generation technology developed by CATT, the China Academy of Telecommunications Technology, along with Datang and Siemens.

On the basis of the insight that Klaus Ahlbeck has gained through several visits to China, he thinks that the Chinese standard will open the door to a market of unprecedented proportions.

The use of cellular phones has exploded so fast that at the start of the fourth quarter of

2002, the world’s most populous nation had 190 million mobile phone users, or almost as

many as those using landlines (207 million). With sales of mobile phones averaging five million a month, the Chinese authorities are keen that the country itself is in control of cellular technology. They are acting on the principle: you can trade with us if you give us access to your technology in return, thus helping your own telecommunications industry.

"It is certainly one of the goals of the Chinese that the growth in value takes place in China,"

Klaus Ahlbeck says.

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