Jane Chen / Shanghai Daily news

Shenzhen-based ZTE Corp has found its patented digital trunking communications technology to be a source of frustration rather than the good opportunity it was expected to be.
The market outlook remains unclear because the country's telecom authority has yet to issue a business license for the Global open Trunking architecture (GoTa) technology which ZTE, China's largest publicly-traded telecom equipment manufacture, has earmarked nearly 600 million yuan (US$74 million) to develop over a four year period, today's Eastday.com said, citing a report by The Economic Observer.
Despite this, ZTE retains full confidence in GoTa, a cutting-edge technology it considers as being at the forefront of the global telecoms business.
To make a breakthrough in commercial operations, since last year the company has invested 100 million yuan to build nearly 30 GoTa test networks worldwide, including one for the recent 10th National Games held in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province.
"It makes me proud to participate in GoTa development," said Liu Shouwen, ZTE product supervisor of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). He believes the market has huge potential.
Echoing his view, Professor Kang Shili, of Beijing Jiao Tong University, said that though digital trunking communications technology remains a mystery to normal phone users, it will soon be a mainstream product of new-generation telecoms.
"It has seen widely applied in the West, but not yet in China, where no such networks have been built", he noted.
But industry insiders expect it to take-off here, the world's No.1 telecom market. The total number of users will likely hit 40 million, according to Wei Guo, general manager of the Jiangsu branch of China Satellite Communications Corp.
Noting that digital trunking has 10 percent of the mobile telecom market, he cited third-quarter data from the Ministry of Information Industry showing that there are 378 million mobile phone users in China.
Due to the late entry of domestic developers, overseas telecoms have dominated China's digital trunking communications sector.
In 2002, when domestic players such as ZTE and its key rival Huawei Technologies Co commenced development, the telecom operator of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games had to adopt the overseas-developed Trans-European Trunked RAdio (Tetra) technology for its digital trunking communications system.
A year before, Tetra and Motorola's Integrated Digital Enhanced Network (iDEN) were set as the two standards for digital trunking communications systems by the information industry ministry. Tetra is marketed by Nokia, Erickson and Marconi.
Huawei is developing its own standard, GT800.