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3G Remains a Beautiful Dream
Although third generation telecommunication is described as a dream by business insiders, it remains at least five years away from daily life to most Chinese people, according to domestic mobile operators.
In last week's GSM China 2001, the annual conference for the global system for mobile communications, major telecoms operators showed hesitation on a rapid transfer to 3G from the present 2G.
GSM is the representative of 2G telecom which mainly supports voice transmission. The technology has more than 500 million users worldwide, with China as the biggest market with 100 million users.
3G telecoms would give the user "always-on" access to the Internet. With a 3G mobile terminal, you could receive multimedia data including voice, data and picture at a very high speed.
Yet Chinese telecoms operators said they would not transfer to 3G very soon.
"3G is not proper for the Chinese market at present both technically and socially," said Lu Xiangdong, deputy director of China Mobile, the country's dominant mobile telecoms operator.
Most of the company's 80 million subscribers still use mobile phones as a phone only, without using Internet functions or instant message services.
Although Internet use reported rapid growth in China, the netizen population is only 30 million at present, which is one-third of mobile phone users, the latest statistics from the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) showed.
And netizens and mobile phone users do not completely overlap as many of the netizens are young students who do not have mobile phones.
"For a quite long period, voice transmission will be the major function of the mobile phones," Lu said.
But the combination of mobile telecoms and the Internet is still an unavoidable trend, so the company will kick off its 2.5G mobile services in June, he said.
Represented by GPRS technology, or general packet radio service, 2.5G will enable a mobile phone to fax and to send or receive large e-mail messages and news updates.
Short message functions, the first form of mobile Internet, reported rapid growth in China this year.
According to figures from China Mobile, 10 billion short messages will be sent from its subscribers this year.
The company charges 0.10 yuan (1.2 US cents) for each message, and 10 billion pieces will mean a revenue of 1 billion yuan (US$120 million) for the operator this year.
China Mobile has joined hands with over 100 websites to launch a project named "Monternet".
Mobile phone users could go to any of these websites to order information they wanted like stock news, sports news, e-mail reminders or even jokes. The websites would then send the ordered messages to the mobiles. 2.5G mobile technology is the most updated and practical method used at present.
Due to the high requirements for network bandwidth, low telecoms charges and high technology level, 3G communication has received a cold response from the markets in Europe and Japan, which recently said they would delay to adopt this technology.
"China is waiting for the best time and to learn from the experiences of those European operators," said Wu Jichuan, minister of the information industry.
Wu said China will not transfer to 3G soon.
Although hesitating for a quick transfer to 3G, both China Mobile and its rival China Unicom are busy upgrading their technology standards to compete with each other.
China Unicom recently started to construct the country's first nationwide 2G CDMA network, or code division multiple access, which provides smoother transfer to the 3G communication.
The company already has a nationwide GSM network which supports 20 million users at present.
Source: chinadaily.com.cn
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