3G cell phones will proliferate in Asia much faster than in Europe because of the burgeoning market in China, an industry leader said Monday. China is the world’s biggest mobile phone market with 250 million customers.

China’s government has taken a series of steps to push 3G development, and it is expected to issue four or five 3G licenses late next year. All three 3G systems may be in the running, 3GSM (W-CDMA), CDMA2000 and TD-SCDMA.

GSM is the world’s largest mobile phone system with nearly 922 million customers. CDMA phones are used by some 164 million subscribers worldwide. TD-SCDMA is a new standard being developed by China.

GSM calls its 3G system, 3GSM, which uses the ITU W-CDMA standard with 5 Mhz channels. CDMA2000 represents a family of technologies that includes CDMA2000 1X and CDMA2000 1xEV and uses 1.25 Mhz wide channels and TD-SCDMA uses a single 1.6 MHz channel rather than paired (duplex) channels.

China has invested heavily in TD-SCDMA (Time-Division Synchronous CDMA), an overlay onto GSM networks and is actively promoting it. TD-SCDMA has been approved by the International Telecommunications Union of the United Nations as one of the three standards for 3-G mobile phones. The first group of TD-SCDMA phones are expected to be available in 2005.

So far, there are a total of twelve 3G networks operational worldwide. Siemens predicts there will be two million 3G users worldwide by the end of this year, 12 million by the end of 2004, 40 million by the end of 2005 and 100 million 3G users by the end of 2006. By 2010, Siemens expects that every handset in Europe will be a 3G phone.

Britain, Italy, Germany, France, Britain and Japan are leading the world in 3G deployment so far. Next year, China issues 3G licences to four operators across 35 provinces. China is expected to launch 3G services in 2005, followed by Thailand, Malaysia and the surrounding countries from 2006 onwards.

In-Stat/MDR finds that the number of cellular subscribers continues to grow, and infrastructure is getting better and cheaper.

“For 3G to be successful, even as a voice technology, handsets must be reliable, and cost effective. While CDMA2000 1X handsets have met this challenge, UMTS handsets have fallen short here by a wide margin. It will take several years for UMTS handset prices to drop to a reasonable point, and for other UMTS handset issues to be resolved. By 2006, UMTS should be a viable solution, whereby operators will deploy UMTS without any second thoughts”.

“We will see explosive growth of 3G next year because a lot of operators will launch their services at the same time,” Bill Gajda, chief marketing officer of GSM Association, told a news conference.

ITU’s original 3G specification, IMT-2000, released in 1998, specified data rates of 2Mbps while stationary and up to 384Kbps while moving using W-CDMA and 5 Mhz channels. TD-SCDMA is said to combine the benefits of TDMA, used in GSM, with adaptive CDMA to handle both symmetrical circuit-switched voice and video as well as asymmetrical packet data traffic (like Internet traffic).

Qualcomm’s multimode W-CDMA, GSM and GPRS chip, will be joined by a separate 802.11b chip now being developed to handle Wi-Fi digital signal processing, disclosed Irwin Jacobs. “Operators are looking to use Wi-Fi to extend their coverage and include Wi-Fi services in the same billing structure,” he said.

Predicting the future can be tricky. Before the Web, There Was Viewtron. A Booz Allen & Hamilton study confidently predicted that “by the middle of the 1990s, the home information systems market would be a $10 billion business and electronic retailing will become a $50 billion to $60 billion field.”

Right idea; wrong decade.

It took almost 20 years from the October, 1983 launch of Viewtron for U.S. online-retail spending to total $70 billion.

Posted by Sam Churchill on Monday, November 3rd, 2003 at 12:46 am.