China Approves 'Home-Grown' 3G Standard

From CMPnetAsia:

"The Chinese Ministry of Information Industry (MII) announced Friday (Jan. 20) that it has approved TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) as a national technology standard for third-generation mobile communicatons. The move means that the technology, which has been under development in China for a number of years, is set to get official support and be used in a stand-alone network the Ministry said, according to a Xinhua report.

The basic technology was originally developed by Siemens AG and offered as a potential standard for the European 3G standard. When it lost out in the late 1990s in a critical vote to wideband-CDMA, which offered broad harmonization between Europe and Japan, Siemens found China receptive to adopting the standard. China has implemented a series of tests on TD-SCDMA since 2001."