Here's our monthly roundup of "news in brief" snippets chosen to demonstrate how the pace of wireless infrastructure and application development in the Middle Kingdom is hotting up, SARS or no SARS.

Shanghai Hosts 2003 Global Mobile Congress
The world's interest on 3G has been focused on new value-added services and new mobile business models due to the pressure of ARPU decreasing in most countries. So obviously it is of great interest to many carriers in the West that, by the second half of 2003, China is due to issue 3G licenses to four major service providers and operators, with 3G commercial services becoming available around 2005.

Reflecting this fact, and reflecting too the expectation that China's mobile users will reach 375 million by 2005, the 2003 Global Mobile Congress due to be held in Shanghai this fall is titled, "Defining the Future." It will comprise two parts: the 3G Congress 2003 and the Annual 4G Mobile Forum (www.4gm.org).

Supported by a welter of wireless organizations including the Overseas Chinese Wireless Alliance, the World Wireless Congress, and the China 863 Experts Group, the event is sponsored by Tsinghua University, BUPT, Southeast University, Zhejiang University, and Jiaotong University as well as by the Chinese Ministry of Science & Technology and the China Institute of Communications.

Readers of WBT who would like to contribute to the technical program by speaking will, if their proposal is accepted, automatically have it considered for publication in major IEEE journals and magazines, such as IEEE special issues on 4G Mobile Technologies. (Also, for those who'd like to bring along their resume, the conference organizers will be looking, on behalf of their supporters and sponsors, for wireless researchers and engineers on 4G mobile and beyond 3G R&D projects in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Xi'an, etc., by international leading industries and R&D institutions. "Very attractive packages and benefits will be provided," they tell WBT.)

China Wireless Explains All
China Wireless, the development stage company charged with providing exclusive marketing, technical, and support services to Tian Gui (literally, "Goldvision"), the monopoly wireless broadband provider in Beijing, announced this month the reason for its late SEC filing.

The company is "working with its overseas counterparts to complete the company's report for the quarter ended March 31, 2003, and expects the report to be filed shortly," a company spokesman said.

"Our new additions to management have been working diligently to advance the company's objectives and prepare the company's quarterly report," president Phillip Allen told WBT. "Unfortunately, it has taken management longer than anticipated to complete the materials due in part to the current conditions in China. [An understandable reference to the SARS epidemic - Ed.] We look forward to filing the report shortly, having our symbol restored, and continuing to advance the company's goals of providing world-class wireless broadband services to Beijing, China (PRC) and throughout all of China."

Tian Gui is an ISP, and has a VSAT license for all of China. In Beijing, the company controls and operates 7.6GHz of spectrum.

4G, Chinese Style
For those wondering what the agenda of the 4G part of the Shanghai conference discussed previously looks like, WBT contacted Professor Willie Lu, of Infineon Technologies in China.

"The vision for the future development of 4G is that there will be a steady and continuous evolution," Lu explained. "For example, the current capabilities of some of the terrestrial radio interfaces are already being extended toward 10Mbps, and it is anticipated that these will be extended even further over the next decade.

"The vision for the future development of 4G is to raise the downstream transmission speed (from the base station to a terminal) to about 30Mbps by around the year 2005, and up to 100Mbps after 2010," he continued.

Lu added that for future 4G systems, there may be a requirement for a new complementary wireless access technology for the terrestrial component, sometime after the year 2010. This will complement the future development of 3G and future development of other radio systems.

"Present digital cellular systems," Lu explained, "have evolved by adding more and more system capabilities and enhancements to make them resemble the capabilities of 3G systems. It is anticipated that with 3G there will also be a continuum of enhancements that may render those systems practically indistinguishable from 4G systems; indeed, the user should see a continuous increase in capability. The vision for a potential new radio interface is to support up to 50-100Mbps in the mobile environment and up to 1Gbps in the stationary environment in the downstream transmission by around the year 2010."

In addition to the above technologies, Wu noted, the critical issues for mobile handsets will be new power technology, new transceiver technology, and open CAI (Common Air Interface) core interfaces. "The architecture of 4G mobile," he concluded, "will be based on the converged broadband wireless platform and targeted for open wireless architecture, with an open core platform that includes open RF interface architecture, open baseband processing interface architecture, open core network infrastructure, and an open mobile application protocol."