China Unicom, the Hong Kong-listed arm of the mainland's No 2 mobile-phone carrier, will soft launch its high-speed CDMA network next week, aiming to snatch high-end users from rival China Mobile.
China Unicom executive director and vice-president William Lo Wing-yan said the 2.5-generation 1X network would be offered first in major coastal cities such as Shanghai, Beijing and Suzhou.
The soft launch will help it gauge user response before the service is introduced nationwide.
The network's faster transmission speed would help facilitate multimedia data traffic, Mr Lo said.
'We tested our CDMA 1X network, the data [transmission] speed is about 80 kilobits per second, which is three to four times GPRS' speed,' he said.
Rival China Mobile, which operates a GSM network, launched multimedia services via a 2.5-generation GPRS network in October last year.
