Reports from China Knowledge and SinoCast Daily Business both indicate that 3G deployment in China is continuing faster than predicted by the three licencee companies. China Telecom appears to be enjoying a clear advantage over China Mobile and China Unicom.
Three licencees have been active in building up China’s 3G infrastructure. One of them, China Telecom, has completed the first phase of building its network and has stated that it is six months ahead of schedule. China Telecom appears to have the advantage of being the country’s largest fixed-line operator, thereby having access to a larger list of potential sales leads than its rivals. The company has in its sights a 3G network covering all Chinese cities of county-level or higher.
A rival to China Telecom comes in the form of China Mobile, which has now deployed 47,000 TD-SCDMA cell towers in 38 Chinese cities according to its statement of August 12. Its 3G-network coverage is now equivalent to its 2G network, which has taken ten years to build up. By end-2009, China Mobile will have erected 85,000 cell towers in 238 cities.
One day after China Mobile, China Unicom declared it would be starting 3G pre-commercial trials in 168 cities. The first phase of China Unicom’s cell-tower construction programme has also been completed ahead of schedule. This is a network covering 342 prefecture-level cities, 2,055 counties and county-level cities, and more than 6,000 villages and towns.
On a more local basis, Zhang Weihua, General Manager of Shanghai Telecom, a branch of China Telecom, has stated his ambition of a base of 5.5 million mobile users, more than double the current 2.13 million. The resulting CDMA 2000 network is also claimed to be the fastest of the three in download, and twenty times faster than the 2G network.
Whichever of the three licencees gets its network rolled out fastest will enjoy a tremendous strength over its rivals in attracting customers to 3G. Observers are witnessing a race against time. As if that was not enough, Li Yizhong, Minister of Industry and IT, has imposed even stricter conditions on the thee competitors: 80 million 3G users from each company in two-and-a-half to three years from now.
By June this year, China Mobile had less than 1 million TD-SCDMA users; China Telecom's CDMA EVDO mobile phone sales have reached 131,000; China Unicom sold less than 50,000 3G cell phones in 2Q09, when China's gross sales as a whole only hit 242,000. Existing 3G terminals and applications can not match subscriber special needs.
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