Franklin Lavin, the US undersecretary of commerce for international trade, has urged China not to try and force telcos in the country to use the Chinese 3G standard, but instead let the market decide what to use. “We do see signs that China intends to tilt the playing field to a national standard, even if customers favor an international system,” Lavin said. “We should let the market determine this. If the government chooses one, that is unfair to customers”, reports TelecomAsia. This is hardly surprising since alternative 3G standards involve large licesning payments to US company Qualcomm. Of course, from all reports the W-CDMA and CDMA-2000 standards are far better than the TD-SCDMA standard, which was always going to be the case because they got several years head-start. Last year the Chinese government said it would allow the telcos to decide for themselves which standard to use, but has spent the last couple of years delaying issuing 3G licenses, with the result that it will be difficult for any carrier to get a 3G network running by the 2008 Beijing Olympics. China Mobile, the biggest mobile carrier in China, has invited suppliers to bid for equipment to roll out a TD-SCDMA network in the 8 Olympic cities, despite not having a license. I’m pretty sure it would only do this if it was certain of obtaining a license in the future—or at least not get penalized by the government—and certain that TD-SCDMA is the way to go to avoid governmental problems. In this way, even if the licenses get awarded at the same time the TD-SCDMA network will have first-mover advantage.