Five to eight years behind more advanced markets, Beijing announced on Friday that it was preparing to hand out licences to the country's three mobile operators allowing them to offer services that include wide-area mobile video calls and broadband wireless data transmission.
The move is the moment of truth for China's homegrown 3G standard, TD-SCDMA – TD for short – and for the country's ambition to take part in the development of technologies that form the future and standards that will be used worldwide.
China Mobile, the market leader, must use TD for its 3G network, whereas China Unicom and China Telecom, its much smaller rivals, have been given licences for W-CDMA and CDMA 2000, the mature standards used elsewhere in the world.
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