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China Mobile investing 58b yuan to maintain 3G edge

By Wang Xing (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-01-13 07:43

Chinese cell phone operator China Mobile said it plans to invest 58.8 billion yuan this year to expand its third-generation (3G) network across the country, hoping to preserve its dominating position in China's 3G arena.

The world's largest mobile phone carrier in terms of subscribers said during the weekend that it plans to build 60,000 new TD-SCDMA base stations in 2009.

That will boost the number of China Mobile's 3G network base stations to more than 80,000, covering 70 percent of the cities under provincial level across the country.

The move is part of China Mobile's effort to better compete with its two smaller rivals China Telecom and China Unicom, which have long lagged behind in the market but were inspired by the country's latest 3G licensing on Jan 8.

China Mobile got its license on TD-SCDMA, the country's home-grown standard, while China Telecom and China Unicom got theirs on CDMA2000 and WCDMA standards respectively, which were believed to be more mature than TD-SCDMA.

China Mobile said it will take advantage of its prevailing 2G network and plans to have 100 million TD-SCDMA users by 2011, earlier reports said.

The company now has about 40,000 TD-SCDMA users but its GSM users reached 450 million.

To stimulate economic growth, China issued 3G licenses last week, kicking off a race among Chinese telecom operators in establishing the next-generation network that enables faster data transmission and allows services such as video calls and Mobile TV.