China Mobile 3G

China has officially released their new 3G service – TD-SCDMA (Time Division – Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access last year but it was not yet fully implemented by mobile phone manufacturers. This is a problem since most of the 3G services would run on either 950/900/1900/2100 frequency which is incompatible with the Chinese standard. That was one of the big reasons why people are not keen in using the service.

Fast forward a year later, we can still see that 3G services in China have yet to receive any support from the consumers themselves. They don’t really want to use 3G services because it is really expensive. However, the biggest problems for China in getting their people to use the 3G service will be the available handsets in the market.

If you noticed, non of the five major mobile phone manufacturers are releasing handsets which supports Chinese’s TD-SCDMA network. It will be a good question in asking the reason why is the case taking into consideration that China have more than one third of the world’s population. With each and everyone holding a first 3G handset from branded mobile phones like Nokia and Samsung (it is Samsung Anycall in China), companies will make lots of profit in the long run as there are not many players in the Chinese market right now.

What is so special about the Chinese 3G service then? In Europe, they are using the WCDMA standard whilst in America, they are using the CDMA2000 standard. The Chinese have released their own 3G standard last year after most than ten years of planning and implementation. The question is here is whether 3G service will attract consumers in the local Chinese market? At the moment, out of 10 people, 9 will tell you that they are either not interested or they are not going to use the 3G service as there are virtually no major handsets running on the new 3G standard in China. Pretty poor planning, isn’t it? Well, at least China Mobile is trying to promote the 3G service in China for the last 18 months but received not much of a success so far.

We have been talking so much of the new Chinese 3G service. Well, what is it actually? TD-SCDMA does not differ much from the other 3G services like CDMA2000 and WCDMA. However, there are more advantages than disadvantages when someone is actually using a network running on TD-SCDMA. One good example will be China Mobile. One can receive strong signals irrespective of whether one is in the lift, underground or in a building. The signal remained strong throughout the year without many disappointments like updating network services like you always seem to come across when you try to call customer services to find out the reason why you are experiencing lots of drop calls or your messages could not be sent for a few hours or more. TD-SCDMA utilizes four types of technologies – TDMA, CDMA, FDMA and SDMA. China Mobile even did a comparison between TD-SCDMA and also WCDMA and the result is astonishing. Clearly TD-SCDMA is superior over here as compared to WCDMA.

This year, China Mobile has signed many MMUs and also contracts between twelve mobile phone companies in the world to release compatible 3G handsets to be used in China. Well, you do get some international mobile phone manufacturers like Motorola, Samsung, Dopod and LG co-operating with local companies.