Motorola has announced a deal that will let the company tap in to the burgeoning brainpower of China's academic community to develop third-generation (3G) mobile data technology.
Motorola's Network Solutions Sector (NSS) will cooperate with China's Research Institute of Telecommunications Transmission (RITT) to better understand what the Chinese market demands from 3G wireless networks and devices. 3G services, set to be rolled out first in Japan next year, are designed to provide access to the Internet and other data networks over high-speed wireless links.
Research on applications, standards, network design and implementation will be carried out at Motorola R&D centers in England and Beijing, as well as at RITT facilities. Each group will contribute approximately 10 people to the project.
RITT, a division of China's powerful Ministry of Information Industry, coordinates technical specification and standardisation work on telecommunications technologies.
Motorola earlier this year expanded its Beijing R&D center and carried out a demonstration in that city of GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), a forerunner to 3G technology.
The deal with RITT exemplifies the deeper technical cooperation that market observers say will drive the next era of foreign investment in China.
Robert Theleen, co-founder and chairman of ChinaVest, a US venture capital firm, said earlier this week that high-tech development is the latest of four major waves of foreign business in China since 1979. A growing pool of world-class technical talent now exists in China's universities and research institutes, Theleen told attendees at a seminar in San Francisco organised by The California-Southeast Asia Business Council.