mobile phone standards to three carriers in a long-awaited step that is expected to prompt $41 billion in spending on new equipment. The Chinese-developed standard, TD-SCDMA, was assigned to China Mobile, the world's biggest phone carrier by subscribers. That appeared to be an effort to make sure the new system has the financial and technical backing to succeed. Licences for two existing 3G standards, W-CDMA and CDMA2000 1xEV-DO, were assigned to China Unicom and China Telecom, respectively. Third-generation, or 3G, technology supports Web surfing, wireless video and other services and the start of service is expected to spur new revenue growth. The technical split by MIIT has hampered the performance of China Mobile in the 3G market, with users and China Mobile engineers alike pointing to the lack of suitable handsets to use on the network. Deployment of base stations has also been slow, resulting in lack of improvement of service for users. The network connection itself has consistently been slower than that from the other two carriers, leading to a sharp decline in market share. By 2011 China Mobile has already moved its focus onto TD-LTE. Gradual closures of TD-SCDMA stations started in 2016. Frequency bands & Deployments The following is a list of mobile telecommunications networks using third-generation TD-SCDMA / UMTS-TDD (LCR) technology. Unlicensed UMTS-TDD In Europe, CEPT allocated the 2010–2020 MHz range for a variant of UMTS-TDD designed for unlicensed, self-provided use. Some telecom groups and jurisdictions have proposed withdrawing this service in favour of licensed UMTS-TDD, due to lack of demand, and lack of development of a UMTS TDD air interface technology suitable for deployment in this band. Comparison with UMTS-FDD Ordinary UMTS uses UTRA-FDD as an air interface and is known as UMTS-FDD. UMTS-FDD uses W-CDMA for multiple access and frequency-division duplex for duplexing, meaning that the up-link and down-link transmit on different frequencies. UMTS is usually transmitted on frequencies assigned for 1G, 2G, or 3G mobile telephone service in the countries of operation. UMTS-TDD uses time-division duplexing, allowing the up-link and down-link to share the same spectrum. This allows the operator to more flexibly divide the usage of available spectrum according to traffic patterns. For ordinary phone service, you would expect the up-link and down-link to carry approximately equal amounts of data (because every phone call needs a voice transmission in either direction), but Internet-oriented traffic is more frequently one-way. For example, when browsing