The world’s first TD-SCDMA handheld call was demonstrated by RTX Telecom and PRISMA Engineering. The Chinese 3G phone standard will use a single channel instead of two (duplex) used by other 3G standards.
In October 2002, the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry announced China’s mobile telecom frequency plan, where a wide frequency range has been allocated to TD-SCDMA systems.
CEO Jorgen Elbaek, RTX Telecom, comments: “This is a very important milestone towards our goal to enable our customers to mass produce the first TD-SCDMA phone by mid 2004.”
TD-SCDMA stands for Time Division - Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access. TD-SCDMA is a third generation mobile telephony standard developed by CATT (China Academy of Telecommunications Technology) in collaboration with Datang and Siemens. China is expected to make a final decision on the standard during 2003. TD-SCDMA delivers speeds up to 2 Mbit/s.
A GSM/TD-SCDMA chipset will be based on the chip supplier’s EDGE and W-CDMA chipsets, and will be able to handle all services supported by the TD-SCDMA networks in China. Handsets will be able to fall back on GSM/GPRS in areas without TD-SCDMA coverage.
China is the world’s largest cell phone market and is using CDMA 1x and UMTS (W-CDMA) standards. China Unicom will use Microsoft’s PocketPC Phone software to develop new, data-focused services for its 207 million subscribers using Qualcomm’s CDMA 1x technology.
Toyko is Trialing TD-CDMA technology. IPMobile has built three cell-sites inside Tokyo metropolitan area with subscribers using both PCMCIA cards and modems with USB interfaces. TD-CDMA is optimized for data traffic and Internet usage. Only one frequency is used for both up and downstream transmission. Other “3G” standards can tie up a (mostly) unused upstream channel for data transmission. But TD has a problem with voice.
Time-Division, Synchronized (TD SCDMA) transmission, being developed for China, allows both voice and data to share a single channel. More users may share the bandwidth and range may be better. Promoters say the single frequency of TD-SCDMA may also be more easily adapted to phased array beam antennas.
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