China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), finally granted 3G licenses to mobile operators in the country on Wednesday, bringing the end of the year and expectations of delay.

There were no surprises in the MIIT announcement (in Chinese) that the three licenses have been issued for 3G services.

As expected, the country’s largest mobile operator China Mobile Communications, has received a license to the use of TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access), a standard that is unique to China and to a great extent proved. TD-SCDMA has been coordinator of the Chinese telecommunications research and development, as well as 3G licenses have been forced to come back repeatedly in recent years as companies scrambled to get the technology ready for commercial deployment.

The two smaller mobile operators received licenses to set up 3G standards, which are used widely throughout the world. China Telecom (China Telecom) was awarded a license CDMA2000 EV-DO (Evolution Data Optimized), while China United Telecommunications (China Unicom) has received a license for the proposal WCDMA (wideband CDMA) services - the most widely used standard for 3G, with hundreds of million users worldwide.

Although China Unicom and China Telecom may seem to have an advantage through the established 3G standards for their services, MIIT statements, it is clear that the success of China Mobile TD-SCDMA service will remain a priority for the government.

“The development of TD-SCDMA occupies important position in the development of 3G. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, National Development and Reform, Ministry of Finance, the State Property Control and Administration Commission, Ministry of Science and Technology, and other relevant agencies to develop policies aimed at supporting the development of TD -SCDMA “, MIIT announcement said.

“There was a lot of talk about the EV-DO and WCDMA more established and widely than technology 3G TD-SCDMA, but we do not believe that this is a lot of advantages for China Telecom and China Unicom,” says analyst Ovum Charice Wang and Raymond Yu, in his statement.

They said the Chinese market is large enough to support the development of the third 3G standard, and said, technology has “tremendous support from the Government.”

“This is not a question of ‘if’ TD-SCDMA will be successful, but the question of when,” they said.