He said he believes that China will continue to pursue the development path in which IT will be intensively and extensively deployed for the country's development. He cited as a case in point the evolution of the CDMA 2000 -- a third-generation (3G) 1X technology -- into a data-only (DO) capability, which is able to provide a data rate of one mega-bit over the existing infrastructure.

"That's an evolution path that is taking place in all of the Americas, in North American and South Americas. And certainly China Unicom now has capability within its network to evolve towards that," he said.

Erickson made the remarks at a time when China recently decided to take a new road to industrialization and give play to the important role of science and technology as the primary productive force. The recently held National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) of China in Beijing set a new direction for China's development, stressing the need to "give priority to the development of the information industry and apply IT in all areas of economic and social development."

When asked to comment on China's new direction set by the recent Congress of the CPC, Erickson said he believes that the new direction will speed up the rate of growth of mobile services even faster. But he stressed that evaluation will be needed for China to develop mobile services in an economical way.

"I think the operators here in China will have to evaluate what their current technology is, and what provides the most economical next step or technology to provide the broadband high-speed data capabilities that 3G is envisioned to have.

"I believe China Unicom will follow the evolution path of the CDMA 2000. Mobile operators in China will have to evaluate the most economical networking combinations based on the available technology in order to best satisfy the clientele's tastes and demands also," he said.

Meanwhile, Cisco Systems recently announced it would provide mobile networking upgrade equipment for China's growing data services and applications. Such equipment is for China Unicom's Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) upgrade project for 15 cities and provinces in China, enabling increase in the variety and scope of applications and services that China Unicom will offer its growing customer base.

Such upgrade will include providing of a series of CDMA 1X core network equipment such as Packet Data Serving Node (PDSN); authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA); and Operations Maintenance and Consoles (OMC) - to upgrade the core backbone network, as well as infrastructure equipment such as routers and local area network (LAN) switches.

On the completion of the upgrade project, China Unicom's CDMA subscribers will enjoy a greater variety of value-added services including multimedia communication, position-location services and wireless Internet access.

Hanh Tu, operations director of Cisco China, said at the ITU Telecom Asia 2002, "Cisco is proud of helping China Unicom realize the advantages of mobile data and value-added services on its CDMA network. Data services are key to the success of future mobile communications.

"Such upgrade project will provide China Unicom with a competitive advantage in the market, enabling them to offer rich services that will ultimately drive consumer interest and subscriber growth," he said. Enditem.

Copyright 2002 XINHUA NEWS AGENCY.