China could issue 3G mobile phone licenses as early as the next two weeks or at the start of the new year, the country’s industry minister Li Yizhong told a press conference Friday. Bloomberg reports that China will award three licenses, including global 3G standards, and China’s local technology, TD-SCDMA. China Unicom will be assigned W-CDMA and China Telecom will be given CDMA-2000. As expected, China Mobile, the country’s overwhelmingly dominant carrier, will be saddled with TD-SCDMA. Li said it could cost 200 billion yuan ($29 billion) to improve the networks, which could help stimulate economic growth. It’s certainly good news for Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Siemens Networks and Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) as well as ZTE who have all won contracts to supply operators with equipment and technology for the upgrade.

China has delayed awarding the licenses to give TD-SCDMA growing room, but the homegrown standard has come under heavy flak from both users and insiders within China Mobile, who have reportedly found products running on the technology less than satisfactory. Still, local press reports picked up by JLM Pacific Epoch quoted China Mobile chairman and CEO Wang Jianzhou as saying the operator had signed on a total of 337,000 TD-SCDMA users as of December, though the breakdown they give, including 4,000 free trial users, 105,000 Olympic users, and 78,000 TD-SCDMA handset users subscribing to the GSM network—doesn’t quite add up to that figure. Wang also said the integration of its TD-SCDMA and GSM networks would be completed at the end of December, after which users can access the TD-SCDMA service with their existing GSM network numbers and cards.

Photo Credit: taiyofj

• China To Issue 3G Licenses, Or Not