HONG KONG -- A top executive at Datang Telecom Technology, a leading company backing China's adoption of its own third-generation (3G) mobile communications standard, has rejected claims by industry heavyweight Qualcomm to key intellectual property within the standard. The statement could trigger a legal battle that would ultimately determine whether Chinese companies would be obligated to pay licensing fees for the 3G technology its government sponsored.
Datang's rejection of Qualcomm came as the executive predicted that network equipment and handsets for the TD-SCDMA standard would become available next year prior to a commercial launch of services using the standard in 2004.
"We believe that the TD-SCDMA standard in China uses a lot of core IPR that was actually developed by the Chinese themselves," Zhou Huan , chairman of Datang Telecom Technology Co. Ltd., told EE Times. He added: "TD-SCDMA does not use Qualcomm technology and we welcome Qualcomm to contact us to negotiate."
China has spent years developing the time-division synchronous code-division multiple-access (TD-SCDMA) specification, which is part of a family of three 3G standards approved by the International Telecommunication Union. Backers of the technology say its more efficient use of spectrum bandwidth makes it better suited to deployment in China's dense cities when compared to the two competing technologies - wideband-CDMA and cdma2000 1X. They also say it is at least 20 percent cheaper to implement and has higher data transfer rates for Internet access.
But only a few days earlier an official from the European Union, which along with Japan supports the alternative wideband-CDMA standard, was reported calling on China to drop plans to deploy TD-SCDMA because it would fragment the market and drive up costs (see November 28 story).
In October, China's government allayed some nagging doubts about its support for the regional 3G specification when it assigned the technology 55-MHz of core spectrum, plus 100-MHz for future use. The two dominant global standards were each granted a 60-MHz block, plus a 30-MHz block each for future use.
The allocation was a welcome bit of reality for a standard still cooped up in the lab. Recent months have been hard going for its main backers, China's Datang and Germany's Siemens AG, as rumors and media reports within China speculated that the government was divided about the wisdom of pursuing a third global standard.
On Thursday, during a visit to Hong Kong to promote the technology, Zhou said it was natural for the Chinese government to support TD-SCDMA when it deals out licenses for 3G service operators next year since so much effort has been put into it by Chinese companies. "In terms of spectrum allocation, you can already see that the Chinese government has given high hope to this technology," he said.
Zhou acknowledged that the companies researching and developing the technology are behind proponents of the other standards, but said the gap is narrowing. "With the maturing of TD-SCDMA, the companies willing to use this technology will grow in number," he predicted.
If that does happen, then any IP rights disagreement with Qualcomm may come to the fore, especially if operators outside China decide to use TD-SCDMA. To date, Qualcomm says it has licensed TD-SCDMA-based technology to more than 40 companies. None have been Chinese firms. Zhou said more than 300 companies have expressed interest in the TD-SCDMA standard.
