Battle Of The Standards

Posted on by

An intereresting piece in the FT today about 3g standards and China. Basically there are three competing technologies: the European-backed WCDMA and US-supported CDMA-2000 standards, and the Chinese TD-SCDMA technology. There is a wikipedia entry on TD-SCDMA. Basically the Chinese system doesn’t imply the payment of license and patent fees (what a surprise) and it offers an asymmetrical data rate, i.e. it offers different speeds for downlink and uplink. The interesting isssue is, I suppose, after all the talk about China soon being the number one market in this, and the number one market in that, to ask the question just how much “upstream standards clout” will all this scale advantage eventually imply. Normally, third world economies would be expected to conform to first world standards eventually, but will the Chinese case be different?

This entry was posted in A Few Euros More, Economics and tagged , by Edward Hugh. Bookmark the permalink.

About Edward Hugh

Edward 'the bonobo is a Catalan economist of British extraction. After being born, brought-up and educated in the United Kingdom, Edward subsequently settled in Barcelona where he has now lived for over 15 years. As a consequence Edward considers himself to be "Catalan by adoption". He has also to some extent been "adopted by Catalonia", since throughout the current economic crisis he has been a constant voice on TV, radio and in the press arguing in favor of the need for some kind of internal devaluation if Spain wants to stay inside the Euro. By inclination he is a macro economist, but his obsession with trying to understand the economic impact of demographic changes has often taken him far from home, off and away from the more tranquil and placid pastures of the dismal science, into the bracken and thicket of demography, anthropology, biology, sociology and systems theory. All of which has lead him to ask himself whether Thomas Wolfe was not in fact right when he asserted that the fact of the matter is "you can never go home again".