A long and fascinating introduction to what happens when politics and national pride get mixed up with technology implementation that’s moving at the speed of Moore’s Law:

This might help explain why [China Mobile] are unable to offer the iPhone.

So, it appears that the largest Mobile carrier in the world, in a country perceived as being rapidly advancing technologically, may have no 3G customers. Why is this?

To answer this question, we need to go back around 20 years.

In the early 1990s, the European Union (and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute or ETSI) decided that a single technological standard should be mandated for digital (ie 2G) mobile phones in Europe, to avoid the national fragmentation that had existed for analogue (1G) services in Europe. This had two features that turned out to be particularly useful. Firstly the phone number and account was separated from the phone handset, instead being associated with a SIM (essentially a smartcard). Secondly, easy international roaming was mandated, and a phone used in one country using the standard would still work when taken to another country using the standard. (In my mind, certain aspects of how resultant choice of networks and billing were handled were botched, and this is a large cause of why international roaming charges remain so horrendous today, but that is a different story). The actual technology of GSM was in certain ways quite primitive, but the resulting system worked very well, at least for voice calls.

In any event, the resultant GSM standard was adopted in Europe by mandate, gaining critical mass. Because GSM hardware was readily available and the standard was well defined, the GSM standard became the most widely used in most of the rest of the world, other than in the Americas, Japan, and Korea. Economies of scale have meant that other standards have gradually lost ground to it and its successors ever since.

“The rest of the world” included China. Two Chinese mobile networks were set up, both of which used GSM, and both of which belonged to the Chinese government. China Mobile was the favoured company, which became dominant, and China Unicom was the secondary competitor.

However, the (principally European) companies that had invented GSM had a heavy patent portfolio, and demanded significant royalties be paid for use of GSM and GSM related technologies. China resented this. This was the situation in around 1995.

via How the Chinese screwed up their 3G mobile phone networks | Samizdata.net.