China readies 4G for a mobile revolution
China has sort of ignored 3G in mobile telephones and opted to go for its own 4G standard.
To talk about China leaping neatly over 3G and moving to 4G does not mean essentially a major leap forward in technology that will immediately change the world.
First of all it is not available, yet, to the people of China. It is available to a group of 10 ‘leading domestic institutions’ (by which you can think government and science institutes) called the ‘FuTURE Project’.
In theory it will allow data transmission at up to 100 megabytes per second — think fiber optic speeds — which is several times faster than current technology. This was announced in the China Daily and you can take it that it is true and official. So is the fact that some RMB150 million ($19.3 million) was spent in developing the technology.
There are two factors which are, perhaps, of vital importance and are being skipped or only touched on lightly in stories about this move by China to 4G, leaping deftly over 3G.
The first is that it will not be in commercial use until 2010. It will not be available for the Olympic Games, 2008, but it will be available for the Expo in Shanghai in 2010. That puts a time frame around it. It will change the mobile world — but not this week.
The second is that most of the mobile phones in the world are made in China. How many? Certainly over 90%. Probably over 95%.
You Xiaohu, a leading and internationally known expert involved in the program, seen above, said that the tests have proved one thing: ‘It testifies that the technology we’ve developed is feasible and brings us one step closer to put it into commercial use. . . . The Shanghai system shows that we have entered the final phase of our project.’
You Xiaohu is also the principal of the FuTURE Project’s expert panel and is widely respected for his abilities. The project has obtained more than 200 patents and some of its core technologies have been adopted by international standards organizations, positioning China as one of the world’s front-runners in 4G technologies.
Now, a small mystery. Wang Xudong, minister of information industry, told reporters at the ITU Telecom World 2006 last month that China would award domestic telecom operators licenses to build 3G mobile phone networks ‘very soon’. But why would you set up your network for 3G when you know that 4G exists and that 4G is from China, for China and will be available within, say, two to three years?
One thing is certain. China has shown that it can develop its own systems, patent it own inventions, bring out its own technical innovations which jump neatly over the competition.
If China makes most of the world’s mobile phones and if China is moving to 4G then how long will it be before we are all living in a 4G world?
Related Posts:
January 29th, 2007
Hi,
Interesting piece!
Which vendors are involved in this trial in Shanghai? Are ZTE or Huawei working with this, or are there others?
January 29th, 2007
Apparently China is going to be the only area of the world where mobile 4G will be a stand-alone network.
February 10th, 2007
NTT Docomo and Samsung also have 4G rollout slated for 2010. What’s the diff? For China, the appearance of leapfrogging can be had today with nationalistic press that fails to mention the year 2010. This looks to be the usual Chinese way, as with the stories about the EAST fusion reactor that had the world wrongly believing China was at breakeven, and when the Russian mathematician Perelman was slighted by the same behavior.