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[Part of the work we do at RADVISION relates to video telephony on mobile handsets. It's a technology that uses 3G-324M as a standard and is available over WCDMA. The Chinese TD-SCDMA network also supports this standard, and now, with its initial launch, Leo Chen, R&D Director of TD-SCDMA Business Unit at SIM Technology was kind enough to grant me a short interview]

SIM Technology is one of the biggest ODM providers in the Chinese market. As a mobile handset ODM provider, they don’t sell handsets under their own brand name, but rather provide it to brand owners who sell and market them instead.

Can you tell me a bit about your company and its involvement with TD-SCDMA?

SIM Technology is comprised of several different business units. One of these business units is the TD-SCDMA BU, which has about 70 employees. In this business unit, we develop and deploy dual mode handsets that are capable of managing either TD-SCDMA or GSM, handing over between these two networks seamlessly.

Our current customers include Datang Telecom, Philips, Postcom as well as others.

How many TD-SCDMA handsets do you have on the market today?

We have provided about 50,000 TD-SCDMA handsets to the Chinese market to date. As far as I know, the total number of handsets on the market is about 300,000.

The handsets we provided are 5 different models under several different brands. They include: Philips TM700; Postcom N269 (Chinese), N270 and T801; Datang Telecom TG1000.

What are the challenges you face in your daily work?

The TD-SCDMA Chinese market is ruled by a single operator today: China Mobile (CMCC).

As terminals in China are sold through the operators and not directly to the customers, it is an operator dependent market. This makes matching the requirements of the operator the main challenge for SIM Technology. When working in front of the operator, we usually work with our partners who own the handset brand.

To give an example, CMCC defines a large set of requirements. Some of these are mobile service definitions, such as the need to support video telephony, streaming, PIM, DM, WAP, MMS, etc. Others requirements cover the user interaction - placement of the keys on the handset and arrangement of menu items.

What are you looking for in third party solutions you integrate into your platform?

Once we map the operator’s requirements, we analyze to see if we can implement these requirements on our own, or do we need to use third parties for it.

We use third parties today for modules such as multimedia services, WAP support, Java, device management, music client and of course mobile video telephony.

When looking for a third party, the most important thing is the ability of that company to map the specific requirements of CMCC. The best one would be someone that already has a product that works and is deployed on CMCC’s network. The selection will be done depending on the previous success of the third party in the Chinese market itself.

What have been your experiences working with RADVISION on the video telephony parts?

Generally speaking, I am quite pleased with your video telephony solution. When we were searching for a solution, our platform used ARM7, which is quite a limited chip with limited memory. Integrating your solution worked well even in this very demanding environment.

What have you find to be the most effective aspect of our products and services?

The fact that you provide the source code of your solution is definitely one of the most important things. It allows us to customize the solution to our own needs when required to do so or to handle minor bugs on our own. It also makes it easier to debug our application as we have access to all of the low level components.

Any plans on IMS in the TD-SCDMA market?

Video Sharing is a request from CMCC today, but it’s still optional. Most TD-SCDMA handset vendors haven’t added it yet, as they were very focused on the mandatory features for the launch of the TD-SCDMA network. POC is another such service that is required.

CMCC is looking specifically for these two IMS services for their network. I suppose that sometime next year we will start to see them deployed.

What’s next on your roadmap, now that the initial launch is behind you?

Next year, CMCC will upgrade TD-SCDMA with HSDPA, which will increase the bandwidth, so CMCC is looking for adding additional services to utilize the high speed data rate.

Things on our minds for our future platform include handset docking, adding GPS, mapping service and dynamic content distribution. Of course we are also planning to add Video Sharing and POC to meet with CMCC’s demands.

The Olympic Games - did it help the 3G handset deployment? Who used the initial handsets launched to the market?

The Olympic Games certainly helped with the initial deployment of the TD-SCDMA network. CMCC released the initial batch of handsets to sportsmen and people related to the Olympic Games.

A nice touch it was the fact that all the TD-SCDMA were handsets that supported mobile TV.

I can say TD-SCDMA deployment is just beginning. Until now it went quite well. SIM Technology is positioned well in this market to grow with the demand.