Development of TD-SCDMA in China

On 20th January, 2006, Ministry of Information Industry of the PRC formally announced that TD-SCDMA is the country's standard of 3G mobile telecommunication. On 15th February, 2006, a plan for deployment of TD-SCDMA in China was announced, some experiments would start after establishing some networks in those selected cities. These trials continued from March to October, 2006, but the results were apparently unsatisfactory. In early 2007, the largest mobile communication carrier in China, China Mobile built commercial trial networks in eight cities, and the two fixed-line carriers, China Telecom and China Netcom built one each in two other cities. It required that construction of these trial networks should be finished during the fourth quarter of 2007, but there were some delays.

On 28th March, 2008, China Mobile Group announced that TD-SCDMA will begin to use for 60,000 test users in eight selected cities from 1th April. Other 3G standards like WCDMA AND CDMA2000 will be delayed to implement until TD-SCDMA is success.

On 7th January, 2009 three main carriers: China Mobile Ltd., China Unicom Ltd. and China Telecom Corp. obtained the third-generation mobile phone licenses. They went to an agreement of long term plan to develop the standard and they would $41 billion in spending on new equipment.

In 2008, TD performed very well during the 29th Beijing Olympic Games, and gained the success of trial commercial service in Chinese 10 big cities. The standards for TD-LTE, the TD-SCDMA technology migration, have been almost fixed and the product development work is under its way. After gained TD license in Jan 2009, China Mobile issued timetable for TD network construction and subscriber development plan. TD is entering a new commercial history era.

The development of 3G standard took a lot of money and time because China's government wanted to develop its own technology to compete with two global 3G standards.The Chinese-developed standard, TD-SCDMA appeared to be an effort to make sure the new system has the financial and technical backing to succeed.