Chinese vendors close the CDMA gap on foreigners

CDMA might be a US standard but quite a few Chinese vendors see it as a chance to close the technology gap with foreign rivals.Chief among these is ZTE, the Shenzhen-listed equipment supplier which won nearly 10% of China Unicom s $1.45 billion CDMA network tender last May. ZTE is to supply 1.1 million of the approximately 15 million lines contracted out by the carrier.

A spokesman from the international marketing department, Rambo Zhou, pointed out that CDMA actually gives Chinese companies the chance to compete with foreign companies on a more even playing field. We ve been doing GSM for only three years, but we have been developing CDMA since 1995, so we are very competitive with foreign companies, he told Wireless Asia.

ZTE is certainly China s CDMA pioneer. The company started paying attention to the standard in 1995, when Great Wall rolled out its trial CDMA systems, and set up an R&D team in 1997.It signed China s first R&D agreement with Qualcomm in November 1999 and carried the first call over a Chinese-built IS95A system in April, 2000.

In the last three months, ZTE has signed two licensing agreements with San Diego-based Qualcomm, which owns the core CDMA patents. One was for infrastructure, signed in April, and another, signed in July, was for handsets, each of them a Chinese first.ZTE has just shipped 1,049 base stations to China Unicom, the focus now is on getting next generation CDMA systems ready.

It is trialing cdma2000 1x with Cisco, reaching speeds of 153 kbps, even higher than the stated maximum of 144kbps for the platform.