High-speed web network 'may achieve global reach'

The fourth generation of high-speed internet, based on China's third-generation system, has a real chance of becoming the world's leading network, a top industry professional says.

Xi Guohua, chairman of China Mobile, said the TD-LTE network, or Time Division Long-Term Evolution, had been developed to cover 46 per cent of the world's populace in the near future, including big-population countries such as China, India and Japan.

Xi, who replaced Wang Jianzhou in March as chairman of the world's largest telecommunications operator by users, said the company would expand a trial roll-out of TD-LTE to 13 mainland cities this year and build 20,000 base stations.

'I'm confident that the experimental scale has potential to be even better,' he said. 'From what we have seen from the tests so far, the result is very satisfying technically.'

He hoped the number of base stations on the mainland would reach 200,000 next year.

Hangzhou is the first mainland city that is using TD-LTE for its bus network, which has an estimated daily traffic of more than 10,000 passengers.

Wang Shouchen, vice-president of ZTE, the second-largest supplier of telecommunications equipment on the mainland, said that as of the first quarter of this year, the company had signed 30 LTE commercial contracts internationally.