China Mobile says 3G isn't winning hearts and minds yet
By Chris Ziegler 
posted Jun 29th 2009 9:42PM
posted Jun 29th 2009 9:42PM
China Mobile officially kicked off commercial 3G services on China's homegrown TD-SCDMA standard way back in January of this year and it's sparing no expense to build it out, but so far, only 3 percent of new subscribers -- that is, those that could easily get a 3G line and hardware if they wanted to -- are opting for the service. It'd be totally cool if 3 percent of China Mobile's total subscriber base were on 3G, but in reality, only about three-quarters of a million folks were signed up by the end of May -- and when you consider that there are nearly half a billion subscribers on the carrier, that's a drop in the bucket. Part of the problem could simply be that TD-SCDMA is unique to China, which limits hardware selection; its competitors are deploying HSPA and EV-DO networks, which may have a better chance of broad acceptance. Either that, or Chinese just hate fast wireless, and we're doubting that.
It's definitely the whole "proprietary" thing. The only reason UMTS and EVDO aren't doing better is because UMTS has hella expensive price plans and EVDO doesn't have any nice phones here (see, would-be UMTS users solve this problem by importing Japanese phones; EVDO users can't do this without losing data)
Damn, people WOULD use TD-SCDMA if they knew what the hell it is. They must be avoiding marketing it to actually succeed in having only 3 percent of new subs choose 3G wares...
Oh no, they put everything into marketing TD, believe me. It's just that the phone selection is crappy and most people already have UMTS-capable phones, making it cheaper to move to China Unicom and their HSPA service (I'm doing this).
I'm in China, on china mobile and i still don't use it. Why not? because my touch pro doesn't support it. and neither does any other popular phone... so you have the trendsetters that are most likely to move to 3G standard, and you don't have any decent phones for them to use. I'd rather have a decent phone with slow data rates (i can often wifi if i want too anyway)
unless you bought your touch pro in China where they disable WIFI on all phones.
Um, re-enabling it is a trivial matter, and they've found loopholes to get around that.