ver, even as coaxial cable has come into wide use for cable Downloaded from Digital Engineering Library @ McGraw-Hill (www.digitalengineeringlibrary.com) Copyright © 2004 The McGraw-Hill Companies. All rights reserved. Any use is subject to the Terms of Use as given at the website. CDMA Now and in the Future Conclusion television, the local access for telephones remains largely copper, and fiber-optic home telephones are prototypes that have not gone into production. In current economic con- ditions, and in a market that has reached saturation of cellular telephones, if not of cel- lular service usage for voice, video, and data, slow growth may be a better choice. And whether that growth will be toward CDMA, with its greater capacity and potential, or a more conservative, but easier step toward TDMA with improved data services re- mains to be seen. 49.1.3 Mainland China Two major telephone companies are competing to deploy cellular telephone networks in mainland China, and the larger one has chosen time division synchronized CDMA (TD-SCDMA) as its preferred technology. The Chinese government is allocating spec- trum to different companies province by province, and it is not clear whether any sin- gle province will have two competing services or not. The mere notion of this level of competition in mainland China is astounding. The reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese control in 1999 probably has helped, because cellular service providers can use Hong Kong as a basis for financial operations, getting investment from international sources. The equipment probably will be largely manufactured on the mainland, where the capacity to produce electronics is growing rapidly. The factories may be owned all or in part by major Western cellular equipment providers, but the production and use of the equipment will remain largely local. To date, no other nation has adopted the TD-SCDMA standard, but companies could use it in the future. If Chinese factories succeed in making equipment at the capacity needed for even reasonably rap