GSM Industry Lectures the Chinese on 3G

GSM Assn. Chairman Craig Ehrich preached the virtues of scale, mobility, and openness at a Beijing handset conference

by Robert Clark

The mobile industry is all about scale, and those with scale dominate.

That was the blunt message from GSM Association chairman Craig Ehrich at a Chinese handset conference in Beijing Tuesday.

Speaking at a session dominated by discussion about country's TD-SCDMA business, Ehrlich reminded the audience that China had done very well out of the open GSM community worldwide.

"I think China has benefited tremendously from the scale as an industry we have brought. We have brought roaming, interoperability and services innovation," he said.

"China benefits from the fact that there are another 2 billion customers around the world using different kinds of services.

"There are a number of successful companies who lead in the world that are Chinese, and if it was not for the scale of the GSM community, I would like to say that I don't think these companies would have been so successful," Ehrlich said.

While China has yet to connect its first TD-SCDMA service, Erhlich said that by 2010 the number of 3G W-CDMA customers would overtake the number of 2G users.

"The GSM family of technologies will continue to dominate the world. If you want the scale of the rest of the world, you want to follow in the course of GSM.

He said he would not argue that GSM was necessarily the best technology. "It's not a question of the technology. It's the business model, and the business model has been proven correct. If you gain scale you can dominate."

The Chinese government has spent heavily on developing TD-SCDMA, and is widely believed to have delayed the issue of 3G licenses in order to favor the technology. The first TD-SCDMA networks - officially "trial networks" - are due to launch by the end of the year.

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