During the recent "TD-SCDMA Innovation Festival", Lv Yan, CEO and president of Lenovo Mobile and chairman on duty of the TD-SCDMA Industry Alliance conference, announced that seven new members will join the alliance.
The seven companies are Samsung Electronics Company Limited; SK Telecom China Company Limited; Netafrique Dot Com Limited; Xiamen Stelcom Information and Technology Company Limited; Shenzhen Winhap Communications Inc.; Jiangsu Ronglian Technology Development Company Limited; and Shenzhen Tat Fook Technology Company Limited.
Of these companies, SK Telecom and Netafrique Dot Com are telecom operators from South Korea and Ghana, respectively. This is the first time that foreign operators have joined the TD-SCDMA Industry Alliance.
Founded in 2002, the TD-SCDMA Industry Alliance was initiated by eight 3G Chinese communications companies, including Datang Telecom, Huawei, and Potevio. On April 1, 2008, China Mobile, the operator of the TD-SCDMA network in China, joined the alliance.
Li Yue, vice president of China Mobile, also revealed at the conference that the company plans to build 100,000 new base stations in 2010, covering all cities across China.
So far, China Mobile has invested over CNY80 billion in the TD-SCDMA constructions, setting up more than 80,000 TD-SCDMA networks in 238 Chinese cities. By the end of 2009, the number of TD-SCDMA users in China had been over five million.