Future Mobile Evaluation

Finished reading an article entitled “Future Mobile Technology: Lessons from China and Korea” by Department of Trade and Industry UK. DTI picked the two most promising countries in Far East as the study case to find out the future mobile evolution. There are some good points to be shared. Let’s look at Korea first,
- Korean companies put more focus on “R” rather than “D” to compete against the USA and Europe.
- Korea, positioning itself, through its national telecommunications research institute, ETRI, as an ally of Qualcomm to develop and deploy high risk and unproven wireless technology.
- Future infrastructure evolution, such as BcN, IPv6 and USN.
- Funding from governments: 15.5 billion won is directed to ETRI, and 2.4 billion won to three universities: Seoul Nat. U, ICU and Hanyang U.
- ~200 spin-off companies from ETRI work closely with IPR development.

Then, some interesting points extracted from the report regarding China,
- Promoting its own TD-SCDMA as a base and direction towards 4G.
- Use a very low cost services and technologies to accelerate the development in rural area.
- Universities and Research Institutes are divided into 2 major groups, FDD and TDD.
- CATR carries out the fundamental research as a state research body on Telecommunication.

Both countries have spent significantly on research and development and enable a rapid transition to demonstration. I predict the same model should be used by our country. The same theory had been applied to semiconductor field previously. Heavy investment on the state research body Mimos but it is hard to see any significant outcome that our country can proud of. Perhaps, just the all Malaysian 16 Bit RISC Microprocessor.......