China's Mobile Operators Getting Ready for 3G

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, December 04, 2002

China's Mobile Operators Getting Ready for 3G

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China's mobile market is expected to continue to bring in sophisticated technology from overseas network operators, while at the same time, give play to market forces in expanding the country's mobile services.

In an exclusive interview with Xinhua Wednesday, Scott Erickson, Lucent Technologies' senior vice president for marketing and sales of mobility segment, said he is confident that foreign mobile network builders will continue to enjoy partnership relationships with China's mobile telecom companies.

Lucent was recently awarded the second-phase contract on building the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) networks in the 800 megahertz spectrum from China Unicom.

He said he believes China will continue to pursue the development path in which IT will be intensively and extensively deployed for the country's development. He cited as a case in point the evolution of the CDMA 2000 -- a third-generation (3G) 1Xtechnology -- into a data-only (DO) capability, which is able to provide a data rate of one mega-bit over the existing infrastructure.

"That's an evolution path that is taking place in all of the Americas, in North American and South Americas. And certainly China Unicom now has capability within its network to evolve towards that," he said.

Erickson made the remarks at a time when China recently decidedto take a new road to industrialization and give play to the important role of science and technology as the primary productiveforce. The recently held National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) of China in Beijing set a new direction for China's development, stressing the need to "give priority to the development of the information industry and apply IT in all areas of economic and social development."

When asked to comment on China's new direction set by the recent Congress of the CPC, Erickson said he believes the new direction will speed up the rate of growth of mobile services evenfaster. But he stressed that evaluation will be needed for China to develop mobile services in an economical way.

"I think the operators here in China will have to evaluate whattheir current technology is, and what provides the most economicalnext step or technology to provide the broadband high-speed data capabilities that 3G is envisioned to have.

"I believe China Unicom will follow the evolution path of the CDMA 2000. Mobile operators in China will have to evaluate the most economical networking combinations based on the available technology in order to best satisfy the clientele's tastes and demands also," he said.

Meanwhile, Cisco Systems recently announced it would provide mobile networking upgrade equipment for China's growing data services and applications. Such equipment is for China Unicom's Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) upgrade project for 15 citiesand provinces in China, enabling increase in the variety and scopeof applications and services that China Unicom will offer its growing customer base.

Such upgrade will include providing of a series of CDMA 1X corenetwork equipment such as Packet Data Serving Node (PDSN); authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA); and OperationsMaintenance and Consoles (OMC) - to upgrade the core backbone network, as well as infrastructure equipment such as routers and local area network (LAN) switches.

On the completion of the upgrade project, China Unicom's CDMA subscribers will enjoy a greater variety of value-added services including multimedia communication, position-location services andwireless Internet access.

Hanh Tu, operations director of Cisco China, said at the ITU Telecom Asia 2002, "Cisco is proud of helping China Unicom realizethe advantages of mobile data and value-added services on its CDMAnetwork. Data services are key to the success of future mobile communications.

"Such upgrade project will provide China Unicom with a competitive advantage in the market, enabling them to offer rich services that will ultimately drive consumer interest and subscriber growth," he said.

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