WiMAX could become one of the casualties of China's long slow march to 3G.
While 3G first became available worldwide six years ago, it is still officially on trial in China in its local form, TD-SCDMA, and the Ministry for Information Industry (MII) has not yet announced when licenses will be formally issued. Despite this, China Mobile is spending $2 billion on rolling out trial networks.
But the outlook for WiMAX is even more uncertain. Spectrum has not been made available and the government has signaled its intention to oppose the approval of mobile WiMAX as a 3G standard.
A number of trials of fixed wireless WiMAX have been held, but only one, operated by China Netcom in southern China, has been commercialized. The mobile version of WiMAX is still in trial phase, with the first major deployment - by Sprint Nextel in the US - not likely until the end of 2007.
Lonnie McAlister, Intel's WiMAX Asia-Pacific product manager, said he believed WiMAX was being held back to allow China's TD-SCDMA to become the mobile broadband standard in the country. He said the WiMAX Forum had been working with the Chinese Academy of Telecommunications Research (CATR) to commercialize the technology, without much success.
'If China opened up its spectrum, I don't believe it would take the WiMAX Forum long to respond,' he said. 'If it allocated 100 MHz or 50 MHz for WiMAX wherever they saw fit, then the WiMAX Forum could actually adopt that profile.'
To give WiMAX a stronger hand, its backers have pushed for its inclusion in the ITU family of 3G standards, known as IMT-2000. It has been given provisional approval and allocated spectrum in the 2.5- to 2.69-GHz spectrum range. A vote will be taken at the World Radiocommunication Conference in October.
'It's very positive for the ITU to go ahead on this,' McCalister said. If approved, it will almost certainly become part of the next-generation of standards, known as LTE (long-term evolution). Like WiMAX itself LTE will be based on OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing) and MIMO (multiple input-multiple output) technologies.
Lack of local support
However, China's main telecom standards body, the China Communications Standards Association (CCSA), has foreshadowed the PRC's opposition to the move.
Wan Yi, director of CCSA's wireless and mobile department, says approval of WiMAX as a 3G technology would 'unbalance' the mobile industry.
'3G technology sits on a triangle of W-CDMA, CDMA and TD-SCDMA, and WiMAX would have a big impact on this triangular structure,' he told the sina.com news service. He added that 'major W-CDMA and CDMA vendors are all opposed to it.'
He said he believed the US government was driving the initiative, and said it should respect the processes and programs of the ITU.
McCalister said the drive to register WiMAX as a 3G standard had the support 'of all the major vendors except Ericsson,' including Chinese firms Huawei and ZTE.