Homegrown 3G comes to China

After years of wrangling, China's 3G networks are starting to take shape with the news China Mobile has put out a tender for the construction of its third generation network.

According to reports in the local press, China Mobile - the country's largest operator - has invited bids for its third generation network, said to be worth 24bn yuan (£1.6bn).

Ericsson and Nokia-Siemens Networks are among the vendors expected to bid to build the network, which will reportedly cover eight cities in China including Beijing and Shanghai.

The Chinese government has yet to award licences for the technology, which is likely to mean a full commercial deployment won't be ready until after the 2008 Beijing Olympics - a situation that has prompted China Mobile to consider adopting WiMax.

While it's still not yet known which flavour of 3G will be used, Beijing has historically favoured a homegrown variant of 3G known as TD-SCDMA. Many Western vendors had hoped that the world's largest mobile market would adopt one of the two more established 3G standards, W-CDMA, as used in Europe, or EV-DO, popular in the US.