Nokia today reaffirmed its commitment to TD-SCDMA at the Mobile Asia Congress in Macau this week.
“Nokia firmly supports the development of TD-SCDMA”, said Colin Giles, President of Nokia China. “Our goal is to not only develop TD-SCDMA products that can deliver outstanding user experiences to consumers, but also to work with operators, chipset providers, developers and all parties along the value chain to support the creation of a vibrant TD-SCDMA ecosystem in China.”
Nokia plans to launch the product before the end of 2009.
Nokia says there are currently over 10,000 third-party Symbian OS applications and the current S60 on Symbian OS will be compatible with S60-based TD-SCDMA devices. Nokia says that TD-SCDMA in the Chinese market will provide new opportunities for developers.
China’s home-grown 3G standard, Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA), received a limited trial during the Olympics and is now undergoing a final, broader test before China Mobile officially launches it by the end of this year.
Meanwhile, the Time Division-LTE specs are scheduled to be done by the end of 2008 when the primary LTE system architecture for the frequency division duplex (FDD) is complete.
First-generation TD-SCDMA is designed to offer top speeds of 384k bps. Unlike other 3G cellular standards, it does not require paired spectrum. The same carrier frequency is time shared for both uplink and downlink, optimizing frequency use and enabling beamforming techniques. It was designed to deliver efficient, cost/effective service for both high-density environments and rural areas.
China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile operator, with 415 million subscribers, has more cellular users all by itself than all the United States mobile operators combined. The company has already spent some $2 billion on trials using TD-SCDMA in 10 Chinese cities since April.
But government mandated TD-SCDMA technology is “a few years behind” WCDMA (the 3G version of GSM) and CDMA2000 (the 3G version of CDMA). That could put the squeeze on TD-SCDMA deployment, suggests Unstrung.
China Mobile also has one of the most aggressive deployment plans for LTE, with a commercial launch targeted for 2010. China Mobile says it is building out the TD-SCDMA network so that cell sites can use the LTE network when it’s ready.
China is by far the largest wireless market on the globe, with a subscriber base of 574.63 million by the end of March, 2008. India is now the second largest wireless market in the world, topping the 258 million total wireless subscribers in the United States this Spring.
- India is the fastest-growing telecom market in the world thanks to India’s large population, low telephony penetration levels, and rise in consumer income.
- China has 362 million landline phones [27 per 100 persons] and 565 million [42 per 100 persons] cellular phones (February 2008).
Global telecom revenue will reach $2 trillion by the end of 2008, an increase of 7.6% over telecom revenue in 2007, research firm Gartner projects.
Informa forecasts subscriptions to UMTS/HSPA will number nearly half a billion worldwide by the end of 2009, and will pass the one billion mark in 2012. Currently some 88% use GSM standards while 11% use CDMA. Global mobile penetration will increase to 95 percent by 2013 from 46 percent in 2008, according to a new survey of 34 emerging markets by Tariff Consultancy.
There are 1.5 billion TV sets in the world. 900 million personal computers, desktops and laptops. The internet had 1.3 billion users at the end of 2007. But mobile subscribers have topped 3.5 billion.
