China will move to 3G before 2008

China's Minister of Information, Wang Xudong, today said the country will move to 3G before 2008. Wang said the government will issue 3G licenses once 3G technology is deemed sufficiently mature. He added that China plans to learn from the mistakes of other countries that have already issued 3G licenses and rolled out networks. China will finish its plan for the development of 3G before the end of this year. China has already developed parts of a program for 3G and organized one of the largest 3G technology tests worldwide. Many insiders speculate that China is stalling on 3G in order to give vendors time to make the country's home-grown 3G standard, TD-SCDMA, competitive with rival standards CDMA2000 and WCDMA.

For more on China's latest 3G announcement:
- read this article from BBC Monitoring