A brilliant article China’s Great Regulatory Wall on Wall Street Journal by Duncan Clark discussed China’s troubled way of its own 3G standard TD-SCDMA’s commercial inception, which is not ready yet even to this day.
 

According to the article, the population of w-cdma has reached 140 million and EV-DO 70 million, both of which have formed a lively industry chain of manufacturers and providers; but look at TD-SCDMA, it hasn’t even reached a stage that’s mature enough for commercial inception.
 

Everyday TD-SCDMA’s falling further behind its other two rivals, especially W-CDMA. HSPA, the so called enhanced W-CDMA, can now transfer data at as high as 20 to 40 Mb per second, which is now even taking fixed-line ADSL’s place as the primary broadband in Sweden, while TD-SCDMA, whose data rate is only at 2.8 Mbps, is still struggling on its way to its commercial inception, which we can only presume to be in summer 2008, optimistically.
 

And there’s price to pay for China’s authorities stubbornness, Duncan Clark discussed:
 

The Chinese telecom solution provider Huawe and ZTE have grown to be a very competitive in the international market, especially on the newly developed territories. But ironically TD-SCDMA, the Chinese authorities are pushing, is actually dragging the two companies back. As their company scales are still smaller than Ericsson, Alcatel-lucent or Nokia-Siemenz, the R&D resource that can be available to them are very limited. Yet Chinese government has assigned them to provide solutions for TD-SCDMA’s commercialization, which unavoidably distracted their resource in competing with their international rivals.
 

And to talk about the initial good wish of TD-SCDMA, which is to help Chinese manufacturers to gain bigger domestic market share, now seem to be redundant. In 2006, Huawei’s domestic sales has gained 22% of the market, overcame Ericsson to become the No.1 in domestic market; while ZTE now ranks the 4th place after Nokia-Siemenz.
 

China’s mobile operators haven’t benefited too much from TD-SCDMA neither. The biggest mobile operators China Mobile has been assigned by the authority to implement TD-SCDMA, when the natural upgrade to W-CDMA from their existing GSM network is ignored; China Mobile can hardly hide their disappointment. And in order to favor the TD-SCDMA standards as Chinese government intended to, no 3G licenses will be issued before TD-SCDMA is ready for commercial inception, which results in the delay of the long anticipated re-structuring of China’s telecommunication industry, which has been a pressing issue for a long time.
 

And come down to the most challenging part of TD-SCDMA’s way to success, are Chinese customers going to like the TD-SCDMA phones. None of the big international handset manufacturers are making TD-SCDMA handsets. There’re probably only ten’s of models of TD-SCDMA handsets to choose from, which’re not produced by famous brands such as Nokia, Motorola; while there’re handreds of W-CDMA models available already. And fashion design and famous brand will become important factors when selling handsets in China.
 

Clearly Mr. Duncan Clark thinks TD-SCDMA is bringing more trouble to China than its benefit. The issues he’s discussed in the article do make great points. As it’s been already made a fact by Chinese government that everything will have to wait for TD-SCDMA’s commercial inception, let hope for the best out of it.