China going for own flavour of 3G in 2005

China is to launch its own 3G standard by June of next year before issuing licences to operators.

The standard, TD-SCDMA, is also backed by Siemens, and handsets to be used on the Chinese networks will be dual mode and able to handle either the CDMA2000 or the W-CDMA standards.

China is determined to have a high proportion of local expertise in its new networks. According to the Wall Street Journal, Zhang Qi, a senior official at the Ministry of Information Industry, has said that everything from the basic chips to the base stations have been tested. She is confident that the handsets will be ready by next June.

She added that this would not cause a delay to mobile operators' construction of their networks. But the Chinese government has yet to say how and when it will issue 3G licences.

The current betting is that licences will go to China Mobile and China Unicom, with a chance that additional licences will go to the two fixed-line operators in China.