Friday, January 09, 2009

3G in China: not a long for now

China finally launched 3G. It is a good news to the telecom equipment manufacturers, considering the over $35 billion investment in the next two years.

lucky or not, I tried 3G phone for two weeks in Beijing this winter. The phone is from Datang, and the network belongs to China Mobile. Frankly speaking, there's no advantage at all; network coverage is poor and the phone is a pain to use. For consumers, it will be hard for them to upgrade their nice phones into some ugly handsets with poor signals.

Definitely don't long on this one for now.

3 comments:

Marc van der Chijs said...

The good thing is that China Mobile will finally have some competition, so they'll be forced to do a better job than they're doing now.

Furthermore, Nokia and Samsung have announced that they will ship phones compatible with the TD-SCDMA standard. I will wait until these phones will hit the market before I start using 3G in China.

Amy Gu said...

en, good point. China Telecom seems have a big plan to compete with China Mobile. Let's see.

Unknown said...

I have just had some hands-on experience of China's native 3G network, TD-SCDMA. Voice calls are always fuzzy, and video calls come with big blocks of mosaics, no matter how the signal reception is. So I'm pretty determined to get a number with China Unicom, when its WCDMA launches.