HONG KONG - The Chinese government has
moved to endorse more and more home-grown
technologies as industry standards for
telecommunications. It is determined to develop a
telecom industry with "Chinese characteristics" to
avoid paying huge fees for foreign-patented
technologies.
China now boasts the largest
number of telephone users in the world. According
to statistics from the Ministry of Information
Industry (MII), by end of August there were more
than 804 million
telephone subscribers,
including 367.9 million for fixed-line phones and
437 million mobile-phone users.
Many
Chinese mobile-phone users, particularly the
young, are fond of sending text messages (SMS, for
short message service) to communicate with one
another. Chinese mobile-phone users send 25
billion text messages on average each month.
During the week-long Lunar New Year holiday this
year, they sent out 12 billion messages. In China
SMS is called the "thumb economy", as the service
brings in huge revenues.
Chinese-character input technology Obviously, the Chinese write their messages in
Chinese, so their handsets must use
Chinese-character input technologies. But about
90% of handsets embedded with Chinese-character
input technologies are imported, costing the
country billions of yuan for the
foreign-registered patents.
Foreign
companies already monopolize the technology for
producing Chinese messages on the country's 430
million mobile phones, and they produce and sell
more than 300 million handsets annually, Wang
Lijian, an industrial expert, was quoted by Xinhua
as saying.
These figures highlight the
fact that the current market for on-handset
Chinese-character input technology is already
huge, but industry insiders say the potential
could be much greater. This means China will have
to pay even more for foreign patented
technologies. Chinese companies are therefore
urged to grab a greater share of the growing cake.
Quoting unnamed industrial insiders,
Xinhua says that some multinational handset
manufacturers have set artificial barriers for
China's home-grown Chinese-character input
technologies to be applied in their mobile
handsets, even for those Chinese technologies that
have proved to be more efficient than foreign
ones.
But analysts say some of the blame
should also apply to domestic handset makers that
themselves decline to use home-grown technologies
for fear of losing their market share, as the
market is dominated by foreign technologies.
Acting to tackle the problem, the MII, the
country's policymaker and regulator of the telecom
industry, called a meeting in Beijing on October
20 to polish and develop China's own
character-input industrial standard.
The
MII-led meeting was aimed at further improving the
corresponding technologies to apply to
Chinese-character processing and at setting and
implementing technology standards in favor of
home-developed technologies for character input on
mobile handsets, according to an MII official.
However, no details of the meeting have been
disclosed.
Mobile-phone TV broadcast
standard In another report, Xinhua said
the State Administration of Radio, Film and
Television (SARFT), China's broadcasting industry
regulator, has announced it will require all
mobile-phone service providers in the country to
use a home-developed technology standard for
broadcasting television signals to mobile phones.
SARFT announced the new standard, STIMI,
last week in advance of an international forum on
standards for TV broadcasting on mobile phones.
STIMI stands for Satellite Terrestrial
Interactive Multi-service Infrastructure, The
technology was developed by the SARFT-affiliated
Academy of Broadcast Science and will be applied
across the country beginning next month, said a
researcher who declined to be named.
"The
introduction of STIMI, of which China owns the
intellectual-property right, demonstrates that
China has world-leading technology in the field,
and will not have to submit to the standards of
other countries," the researcher was quoted as
saying.
He said the domestically developed
STIMI technology is better than mobile-phone TV
standards in other countries, as it will broadcast
TV signals via satellites.
China's two
mobile-service providers, China Mobile and China
Unicom, have both set up cellular-phone TV systems
of their own, and their mobile-phone TV services
already have more than 1.5 million subscribers.
The number is expected to grow rapidly.
Asked whether the new standard would be in
conflict with standards already in use in China, a
SARFT official would only say there are no
conflicts of interest between Chinese
mobile-service providers and the SARFT, Xinhua
said. "The real fight is between the domestic
industry and foreign standard makers," he said.
Yet a source with a Chinese mobile-service
provider said it would be difficult to promote the
new standard. "It will take a while before the
cell-phone TV service with the new standard can
penetrate the market," he said. "Few people are
willing to invest in the newborn standard."
Other standards Last week, an
Asia Times Online report (Looming standards war in
China, October 25) said China would
also adopt a home-developed technology as the
industry standard for wireless networks.
The International Standards Organization
(ISO) may have rejected China's proposal to accept
its home-grown WLAN (wireless local area networks)
as an international standard, but it appears that
its prestigious WAPI (wired authentication and
privacy infrastructure) is gaining ground fast
within the country, said the report.
"According to the China Electronic
Standards Institute, it is important that China
also develops its own standards because it is
already a pre-eminent manufacturer of
standard-based products and also a huge user of
such products," the report said. "Therefore, China
needs to reduce the license fees it pays to an
international developer of standards to use those
products, as well as to earn
intellectual-property-related revenues for making
such products."
It is now also widely
believed that when China begins to issue licenses
for 3G (third-generation) mobile networks, the
government will be inclined to use a technology
developed by Beijing-based Datang Telecom as the
industry standard.
China is also working
on its own technology standards for IPTV
(Internet-protocol television) and making efforts
for its standards, or part of them, to be adopted
internationally.
John Ng is a
Hong Kong-based freelance journalist.
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