The Chinese policy to promote “indigenous innovation” is perhaps most evident in the telecom sector as recent developments show.
China Mobile, China’s largest telecom operator, recently presented several new models of the Ophone handset models which are to compete with the widely popular iPhone and due for release later this year. One model is developed by Dell while other handsets are being developed by Lenovo Mobile Communication Technology (pictured), HTC Corp, LG, Phillips and Motorola.
China Mobile operates a TD-SCDMA 3G network which is domestically innovated and backed by the government. Also, the new handheld OS is based on Google’s Android OS with applications available on China Mobile’s online Mobile Market (see article). To support handset research projects based on the TD-SCDMA technology, China Mobile funded 6,5 billion.
One big event last week was the celebration of the The People’s Republic’s 60th anniversary on “National Day”, October 1, which prompted large security actions. But not only by posting armed guards in the cities; the southern city of Guangzhou ordered Internet providers to install certain “security monitoring” software on all servers in order to “create a favorable online environment” for the celebrations (see article).
The National Day celebrations also brought a joint effort from Xinhua News Agency and China Mobile to offer mobile, live, all-around coverage of the festivities. 0.8 million China Mobile subscribers were expected to watch the parade ceremony using Mobile Video, of which tens of thousands would do so using a TD-SCDMA cell phone.
Announcements were recently made from China Mobile that it had partnered with Nokia Siemens Networks to demonstrate a TD-LTE femtocell which is said to provide indoor coverage for 4G networking platform. TD-LTE is backwards compatible with TD-SCDMA, making China the most suitable country for its use. The new technology brings higher speeds than current residential broadband networks are capable of and can fully utilize TDD frequency, thus providing fast and flexible indoor connections and allow for easy management of network capacity and cost (see article).
