China's first homegrown third generation (3G) wireless telecom standard, the TD-SCDMA (time division synchronous code division multiple access) technology, is winning growing favor from foreign investors at the brink of being put into commercial operation this June, according to the Economic Daily on Tuesday.

At the 2005 International TD-SCDMA Summit held in April in Beijing, Alcatel Shanghai Bell Co., Ltd. and Datang Mobile jointly demonstrated the solution to TD-SCDMA.

"It is a sign of significant progress in China's TD-SCDMA industry to show that the solution is reliable, and that is the basis for it to be put into commercial operation," said Gerard Dega, president of Alcatel Shanghai Bell.

At the summit, Deng Hequan, deputy director of Academy of Engineering of China declared that the standards researched and developed by China on its own have improved the conditions for commercial use.

As one of the three major 3G technologies in the world, TD-SCDMA, which is the intellectual property of China, is thought to be able to change China's telecommunication industry, which had been short of a technological standard of its own.

However, for a time, the new standard did not get favor from its foreign counterparts for lack of capital and its late launching in time. But with the strong support from the Chinese government and the endeavors of China's telecommunication enterprises, China has witnessed rapid growth of TD-SCDMA despite Europe's WCDMA and the United States' CDMA2000, already on the market.

As a result, more and more foreign firms began to change their attitudes and develop use of TD-SCDMA.

Except for the cooperation between Datang and Alcatel Shanghai Bell, a breakthrough in the terminal bottleneck of TD-SCDMA has been made jointly by 15 enterprises both from China and overseas. The development for a terminal chip for mature commercialization is expected to be completed at the end of this year.

Some foreign experts see good prospects for TD-SCDMA to be a standard not only in the Chinese market but also in the global market.

Olivier Banjardgo, Chief Technological Officer of Alcatel, saidlast month at the 11th China-France economic symposium that China's TD-SCDMA 3G is a technology of great potential. Whether it can go onto the world market hinges on the policy of the Chinese government.

According to him, TD-SCDMA should be launched first in China. After proving itself in this largest telecommunication market in the world, there is no doubt the technology will go to the world, said Olivier.

China has seen rapid growth of its telecommunication industry in the last decade with an annual growth rate of 20 percent. Present fixed and mobile telephone users are nearly 350 million, the most in the world. But telephone coverage is only 30 percent, still a market of great potential to world telecommunication enterprises.

(Xinhua News Agency May 18, 2005)