China Mobile, one of the Olympic sponsors, has built TD-SCDMA networks in six key Olympic host cites, notes Market Watch.
The Olympic handsets feature dual mode GSM/TD-SCDMA standards and come with chips for satellite TV, using China’s Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting. It’s similar to Europe’s DVB-SH standard for digital video broadcast. It uses both satellites and terrestrial ‘gap fillers’ to broadcast to handheld devices. The phones are reserved for athletes, officials, volunteers and VIP guests.
Lenovo Mobile’s TD900 is one of Lenovo Mobile’s “new vision” model series released in July 2008. The TD900 is a tablet phone; it supports TD-SCDMA/GSM dual mode and 3G applications such as video phone and mobile-TV with auto-roaming.
Content is delivered by a satellite broadcast network, not China’s new TD-SCDMA wireless broadband. Several radio programs and approximately eight TV channels including CCTV1, CCTV Olympics and CCTV News, will be provided free.
This year, China Telecom bought Unicom’s CDMA business. China Telecom plans to support 100 million subscribers on an expanded CDMA network.
China Mobile is also expected to carry the responsibility to make China’s TD-SCDMA standard commercially viable. If it gets an official license as expected, this should help to get foreign handset vendors involved — although the majority of its people still like to buy GSM handsets from Nokia and other suppliers.
China is also developing Long Term Evolution, but based on TD-SCDMA, to be known as TDD LTE.
But can China wait until 2010 or 2011, when it’s expected to be ready, asks Market Watch? Hey, I know where they might get a mobile television satellite cheap. Toshiba said it will shut down its four-year-old, satellite-based digital multimedia broadcasting service in Japan, which it offers through their Mobile Broadcasting Corporation unit.
The MBSAT from Mobile Broadcasting Corporation is a three-axis attitude stabilized geostationary satellite designed and manufactured by Space Systems / Loral, based on the SS/L 1300 bus and featured a 12m-aperture (40 foot) S band high gain antenna.
In 2005, South Korea began a similar mobile TV service using Satellite-DMB (S-DMB) and terrestrial DMB (T-DMB) service. Since launching in May 2005, South Korea’s TU Media has signed up more than one million subscribers, uses the S-DMB (satellite digital multimedia broadcasting) standard, offering 15 video and 19 audio channels.
Toshiba said the Japanese service has failed to attract sufficient customers in the face of demand for free mobile broadcasting services that are targeting mobile handsets. Toshiba said it will dissolve the company and end services by March of next year. It is expected to cost Toshiba about $232 million. The company launched the service in Oct. 2004.
Related Dailywireless articles include; 2008 Summer Olympics: On Demand, China Showcases TD-SCDMA at Olympics, 2006 Olympics Unwired, China Mobile Goes TD-SCDMA , Olympics on ATT MediaFLO Channel, Olympic Marketing Metrix, Olympic Mesh, China Mobile Goes TD-SCDMA, WiMAX Now ITU Standard, HSPDA in China, Cell Data on a Single Channel, UMTS TDD: The Other Broadband Standard, TD-SCDMA Joint Venture.
