I am very curious as to your comment: “BTW another great usability plus for the iPhone in China: The ease with which you can add a VPN tunnel to get your twitter/facebook/wordpress/youtube/blogger/RSS fix from within the great firewall — even over Edge.”

I take this to mean that the average Chinese citizen, owning an iPhone and using one of the 3 main 3G networks, can create a VPN and access the outer frontiers of the internet? The parts blocked in China? How does the government react to this, if at all?

BTW another great usability plus for the iPhone in China: The ease with which you can add a VPN tunnel to get your twitter/facebook/wordpress/youtube/blogger/RSS fix from within the great firewall — even over Edge.

http://www.unstrung.com/document.asp?doc_id=168194

The upgrade to TDD-LTE shouldn’t be that painful. I’m working with one of the vendors providing the tower-top radio equipment for China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA network and I’m pretty sure that the hardware will support TDD-LTE. They still need to upgrade the base-band equipment at each cell-site but that’s a lot easier than climbing the towers to replace the RF gear. Also, Hauwei’s gear is supposed to support SW upgrade-ability and multiple standards which means that much (if not all) of China Mobile’s TD-SCDMA infrastructure may be software upgradeable to TDD-LTE.

China Mobile: TD-SCDMA (the Chinese homegrown variant)
China Unicom: UMTS/WCDMA/HSPA (which is what the iPhone uses)
China Telecom: CDMA2000 (also used by Sprint and Verizon in the US)

China Mobile, Unicom and Telecom have about 500, 150 and 50 million mobile subscribers respectively so China Mobile is clearly the heavyweight. China Unicom currently has about 1 million 3G subs

http://www.reuters.com/article/rbssTechMediaTelecomNews/idUSPEK15698620091103

The interesting question w.r.t the iPhone and all the other superphone players is what happens with China Mobile? TD-SCDMA is considered a bit of a boondoggle and doesn’t work very well. China Mobile and the Chinese government are looking for a face-saving way of moving past it and the likely path is TDD-LTE, a variant of LTE that they can migrate to with their current infrastructure (for complicated technical reasons, they can’t migrate to either FDD-LTE, which is what most everyone else will use, or HSPA).

The way they’ll save face is by claiming that TD-LTE is a natural, next generation evolution from TD-SCDMA, which it isn’t really but that’s besides the point (LTE isn’t really an evolution from HSPA either, it’s a completely different wireless access protocol but it sounds nices to claim it’s an “evolution” from the existing technology).

There’s no way Apple’s going to make a TD-SCDMA device so China Mobile won’t get the iPhone until there’s an LTE version, which is still several years away (Apple won’t build one until there are enough LTE networks out there). The first LTE devices won’t necessarily support TDD-LTE (you need more complicated radio hardware to support TDD-LTE and FDD-LTE). However, it would behoove handset vendors to support TDD-LTE if they want a crack at China Mobile. So the real iPhone action in China is still a few years away.

And astonishingly, that’s a very interesting idea you have here. Lots of chagrin was expressed by Apple bulls when the measly official sales of iPhones in China were released. . . “oh no,” most of them said, “the Chinese just aren’t ready for smartphones” and other AAPL apologists, like Gene Monster at Piper Jaffrey, spent much ink trying to tell us it was OK, China isn’t that important anyway.

The Android fanbois, on their part, used the datapoint as proof the global market for overpriced Apple kit was a 1st world phenomenon, and probably over-penetrated already and that the world was ready for cut price hardware with Android OSes.

Clearly both are wrong. Althoughz in a wider sense, in seeing iPhones taking over the world, the Gene Munsters are also right. This is the group Baruch is temporarily allied with. 2m iPhones in China makes loads of sense. And that without any 3G in China at all. It’s impressive, innit?