China Mobile expands 3G and prepares for 4G

China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou continues his 9-day tour Taiwan today, and has announced two new deals with Taiwanese companies. Wireless chipmaker MediaTek will be creating 3G chips for China Mobile devices, while Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute will be working with it on 4G technologies.

MediaTek:

MediaTek is a global semi-conductor company. It even has assets here in Ireland! It’s also “fabless”, which means it doesn’t manufacture any of its own chips - it outsources all fabrication so that it can concentrate solely on sales and R&D.

Since China Mobiles 3G services run on a proprietary network architecture (TD-SCMA), it requires mobiles with specialised chips to run 3G services. In the past, MediaTek has supplied chips for up to 60% of China Mobiles devices, so its well acquainted with the ins and outs of TD-SCMA. There’s no word on whether the percentage of devices carrying MediaTek hardware will decrease or increase, but Wang Jianzhou and MediaTek Chairman Ming-Kai Tsa came to an agreement that the two companies will continue working together.

Industrial Technology Research Institute:

Hsinchu Science and Industrial Park is like Taiwans versions of Silicon Valley. It is a huge area, supported by the Government, that contains over 400 high-tech companies. Many of them are involved in researching and creating hardware and chips for telecommunications and mobile technologies. And it is here that China Mobile CEO Wang Jianzhou hopes to make a lot of alliances.

Today, he has announced the intention of China Mobile to work with the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). This non-profit research agency has created a lot of the major technology which has Hsinchu Park a global powerhouse. Wang Jianzhou has announced that China Mobile work with the ITRI to develop 4G technologies for mainland China.

What we think?

It’s interesting to see China Mobile handling two different branches of mobile technology at the same time. Having to develop 3G technologies for the China-only TD-SCMA architecture hasn’t made things easy for China Mobile - it has lead to a slow start on 3G services, where rival operators using global standards have been able to start more smoothly. So it’s no surprise that China Mobile is going back to MediaTek. I’ll be interested to see where the 4G research with ITRI goes. China Mobile might have to use the same proprietary architecture to host 4G services, or it could develop a system based on existing standards, like Korea tried with WiBro.