The Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has designated China Telecom, China Mobile and China Netcom each to choose a city to commence their respective testing of TD-SCDMA trial commercial networks.

MII asks each of the three to build a trial network that has about 100 nodes and can cover 3000 people. The construction of the network must be completed by the end of March, while the test must be finished by the end of June.

In addition, the operators, particularly China Mobile are being asked to stop constructing new WCDMA trial networks.

TD-SCDMA is one of the three 3G standards recognized by International Telecommunication Union (ITU). It was first put forward by Datang Telecom in 1998 and was formally adopted by ITU in 2000.