Advocated by China Mobile, China Unicom, the two largest operators of China's mobile communications, together with Datang Telecom, Huawei Technology Co., the two telecom technology providers and Motorola as well as Nortelnetworks and Siemens, a "TD-SCDMA technology forum" was held September 23 to help promote China's 3G system for mobile phones in the global market.

TD-SCDMA (time division-synchronous code division multiple access) standard, the standard for the third generation mobile communications put forward by China, has been adopted by the International Telecommunications Union as one of the 3G mobile communications. It is the third major rival for the WCDMA supported by Europe and the CDMA2000 of the United States.

The TD-SCDMA technology forum advocated and set up presently will provide an open communication platform for the global mobile telecom operators, manufacturers and relevant factories and scientific institutions. So that they will be able to know the standard, and to develop and improve it through joint efforts, thereby making it a widely accepted standard for the 3G mobile communications in the world.

According to experts the main challenge for the 3G mobile communications comes from whether it can provide symmetric circuit switching business such as sounds or video transmission and the ever-increasing asymmetric packet switching service such as mobile Internet access. The data rate of TD-SCDMA can reach as high as 2M, which is very suitable for broadband application, meanwhile the technology adopted will help set the wireless frequency resource to reach the most optimized utilization rate. The first on-the-spot trial of the TD-SCDMA was finished in Beijing, and its operation system for commercial purposes is to be launched by the end of 2001.

(People's Daily 09/27/2000)