China Mobile has joined the home-grown 3G industry alliance and has cut the telecommunications cost of TD-SCDMA services in a bid to make TD-SCDMA mature enough for commercial use, industry insiders said yesterday.

Ten firms, including China Mobile, have become members of the TD-SCDMA (time division-synchronous code division multiple access) Industry Alliance, the alliance's Website said yesterday.

Other new members include chipset designer MTK and China's biggest handset distributor PTAC.

"The move shows China Mobile's decision on TD-SCDMA. China Mobile's leading position (in mobile communications), MTK's strength on chip design and PTAC's channel advantage will jointly push the industry development," Shenyin & Wanguo Securities said in a note.

China Mobile started tests of TD-SCDMA services in April and China is expected to issue 3G licenses after the commercial use of TD-SCDMA.

China Mobile has applied to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to set up new entry-level package of data services on TD-SCDMA, according to the MIIT Website.

Service packages

To woo more consumers to test the TD-SCDMA data services, TD-SCDMA subscribers are allowed to pay five yuan (72 US cents) for 30 megabytes' monthly data consumption, 20 yuan for 50M and 30 yuan for 500M. Previously, the data service packages started at 100 yuan.

Data services, such as video call, high-speed Internet access and multimedia download, are killer applications of 3G, industry insiders said.

China Mobile also plans to expand the TD-SCDMA coverage to 38 cities from the present 10 cities soon, according to media reports.

China Mobile, which confirmed it is to upgrade the TD-SCDMA networks to 3.5G, declined to comment.

China has upgraded the existing trial of a 3G network to 3.5G in four cities including Shanghai, which raises 3G phone download speed four-fold.

China Mobile's big-scale network upgrade is expected to come in the first half next year, according to Shenyin & Wanguo Securities.

(Shanghai Daily July 15, 2008)