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Shrewd 3G gambit won't necessarily mean market success

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-01-10 00:22

Is China a maverick for choosing to heavily push its own independent technology? Is it coincidental that the task of promoting TD-SCDAM fell to the leading service provider when the advantage of choosing TD-SCDMA is the avoidance of roughly 15 percent royalty fees to WCDMA or CDMA2000 technology holders?

The target of developing 3G, 4G, and whatever G, is to unify mobile gizmos into a unified technical standard. Global roaming is still a dream as mobile network operations in industrialized countries like the US and Japan are not yet unified.

Exactly as industry experts estimated, the Chinese regulator issued three 3G licenses, including TD-SCDMA and two alternatives, WCDMA and CDMA2000. The hasty launch of TD-SCDMA would rather be seen as a preferential strategy that allows the home-grown technology to take off first while its competitors are waiting in the wings.

Are TD-SCDMA and its two peers able to seduce GSM users as GSM did when it breezily dragged customers away from brick-sized analogue mobile phones in late last century? That's yet to be seen. The bells and whistles of killer applications and video telephony for 3G will be mute unless product quality and marketing models dramatically change. We simply don't need a 3G that only enables us to clearly hear the other party's breath or hiccup.

It is a little bizarre that in the low-tech Chinese society where hi-tech acronyms, like TD-SCDMA, WiFi and GPRS, are everywhere, all spoken in English. In contrast to Western marketing that avoids clunky technical brand names, China's high-tech toys are branded with lengthy, confusing technobabble in an effort to convey that the product is reliable and faddish.

3G will be obsolete soon. NTT DoCoMo plans to begin commercial 4G use by 2010 in Japan. Technically, 4G is 2000 times faster than 2G in transmitting data, and almost 20 times faster than standard copper cable-based ADSL services. 4G promises to deliver high-quality smooth video and data transmission. Doesn't that sound much juicier than the 3G we are going to have? We'll find out ... in six years.

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