China Approves 'Home-Grown' 3G StandardChina Approves 'Home-Grown' 3G Standard

LONDON — The Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (MII) announced Friday (Jan. 20) that it has approved TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) as a national technology standard for third-generation mobile communicatons.

The move means that the technology, which has been under development in China for a number of years, is set to get official support and be used in a stand-alone network the Ministry said, according to a Xinhua report.

The basic technology was originally developed by Siemens AG and offered as a potential standard for the European 3G standard. When it lost out in the late 1990s in a critical vote to wideband-CDMA, which offered broad harmonization between Europe and Japan, Siemens found China receptive to adopting the standard. China has implemented a series of tests on TD-SCDMA since 2001.

The Chinese government is yet to issue any licenses for 3G services operators licences, which are expected later this year.

When Europe and Japan adopted wideband-CDMA it was thought that one motivation was to split the Chinese market while keeping the U.S. standard CDMA-2000 out of China and their own markets. China may still offer 3G licenses to operate using WCDMA or CDMA-2000 alongside TD-SCDMA.