"There has been much talk about EV-DO and WCDMA being more established and widespread 3G technologies than TD-SCDMA, but we don’t believe this is much of an advantage for China Telecom and China Unicom," wrote Ovum analysts Charice Wang and Raymond Yu in a statement.

They said the Chinese market is large enough to support the development of a third 3G standard, and said the technology has "immense government backing."

"It is not a matter of ‘if’ TD-SCDMA will succeed, but a matter of when," they said.