telecom - The bloody battle of 3G

While officially the test for the upcoming 3G-revolution should be beginning, a bloody fight is emerging with China's largest mobile operator, China Mobile, as the major opponent of the Chinese standard TD-SCDMA, writes China Tech News. China Mobile has built its past successes on GSM or the European standard and would rather build on that infrastructure in stead of rolling out a whole new one to facilitate the Chinese standard.

Very early on in the TD-SCDMA process, a China Mobile engineer told a friend of mine "you GIVE me a TD-SCDMA, and I wouldn't take it."

While their argument makes economically perfect sense, my estimation is they are not going to stick to this point. They are in a similar position China Unicom was when they were forced for political reasons by former premier Zhu Rongji to roll out the American standard CDMA next to the European GSM. They did not like it, it did not make sense economically, they can oppose, but in the eind they are a state-owned entity and will have to follow the lead of the government.
In this case the stakes are even much higher: developing a Chinese standard has already been very hard in going to space, making a Chinese car or producing a Chinese airplane. In this case a Chinese standard seems costly but possible. No way China Mobile is going to win this battle.