Among the central elements of the agreement is the creation of a joint R&D center in Shanghai to work on development of the architecture and portfolio of products and services, the two said in a statement.

The use of the term HSPA, high-speed data access, rather than the more common HSDPA (the so-called 3.5G successor to W-CDMA in the GSM world, in which the download speeds get up to 7.2Mbps by the end of next year) or HSUPA (its 3.75G sibling that improves uplink speeds, again in the latter part of next year), is simply because they’ll be working on both.

Rosemont, Illinois-based Motorola said its contribution to the partnership would include its services expertise in network design, deployment and integration, plus value-added services such as network performance, network security, network management and Operation Support Systems (OSS), while Huawei would provide its dramatically increasing expertise in technology innovation, R&D.

The two sides characterize the relationship as an enhancement of an existing one, going back over a number of years, in the area of UMTS infrastructure, though Tom Quirke, worldwide director of marketing for the US company, declined to elaborate further on what had gone before.

As for the current announcement, it involves a collaboration in which we’ll bring our market analysis and understanding to the joint planning and design of a whole new portfolio during 2006, which Huawei will then produce and each company will sell with its own separate branding, Quirke explained.

In other words, it is not a joint venture, producing a common portfolio to marketed under separate brands, as the Shenzhen-based Chinese vendor has with data networking company 3Com. Indeed, the uncertainty of how Huawei 3Com will evolve, given the shareholder agreements at its creation, may well have been something that shaped how this deal was structured.

In this case, the two companies contribute R&D brains and carry out the development work in China, where Huawei has armies of highly trained, low-cost researchers, then the Chinese company makes the stuff for them each to sell under its own steam.

Indeed, Quirke admitted, they might even be in competition for certain contracts, though he was mum on how the revenue would be split if Huawei sold the kit that both sides had come up, beyond a generic statement that joint inventions will be jointly owned.

In any case, thus is clearly an attempt by Motorola to get an inside track to capturing part of the mobile network infrastructure market in China itself, as much as it is also about getting a cheaper production base for network infrastructure to be marketed globally.

China is already the world’s largest mobile market in absolute subscriber terms with in excess of 400 million, and though no licenses have yet been issued, it is tipped by analyst firm Analysys to have 270 million 3G users by 2011.

Meanwhile the Chinese government continues to drag its feet over 3G licensing. At least part of the motivation for the delay is to give time for China’s homegrown UMTS standard, TD-SCDMA, to gain some muscle against W-CDMA and cdma2000, the consensus among China watchers being that this will postpone actual licensing yet again, till at least spring 2007.

Quirke declined to say whether the deal with Huawei would extend to TD-SCDMA, but of course, since the latter is, at the behest of China, now part of the UMTS family of standards as recognized by the ITU (alongside W-CDMA and cdma2000), the use of the catch-all acronym would tend to suggest that it will go there.

The authorities in Beijing appear to be sufficiently committed to cutting a slice of the 3G pie to the locally developed standard that another analyst firm’s prediction of 80 million 3G subscribers in the country by 2008 factors in that 27 million of them will be on a TD-SCDMA network.

While Motorola casts the deal as something that’s been a long time coming, it is hard not to also see it against the backdrop of the recent announcement by the company’s archrival Nokia Corp that it would be merging its networks business with that of Siemens AG in what is clearly going to be a Nokia-run outfit, not to mention Alcatel’s acquisition of Lucent, which just got the go-ahead from the EU.

Both resulting entities will be larger in infrastructure than Motorola, with formidable market reach in each case. While it certainly has been making inroads in terms of market share on the handset side, Motorola clearly wants to be a heavy hitter on network infrastructure too, and sees low-cost China as key to doing so.