China had been, for a while now, ignoring the newest GSM Association cellular phone standard ‘Wideband CDMA’ (WCDMA) in favor of a Siemens-developed technology called ‘TD-SCDMA.’ The downside of this is that China’s burgeoning cellular market would be generally incompatible with GSM, the standard used by over 70 percent of the world’s mobile phone market, meaning the ability to roam worldwide with a single phone would stop once a customer set foot inside China (much like could happen here in the States occasionally, but that’s a different story).
Now Reuters brings word that the GSM Association has worked with the TD-SCDMA Forum to coordinate development of the separate-but-equal technologies to provide international roaming and interoperability between the two standards, which can apparently be deployed simultaneously on top of GSM core networks. The upshot? China gets out of paying royalty fees to the inventors of WCDMA, while your future 3G phone may work around the world after all.
Read [Reuters]
