China 4G market to heat up as new network trials start

Competition in the mainland's nascent 4G mobile services market is expected to intensify this quarter after China Unicom and China Telecom start their so-called hybrid network trials in 16 cities.

The regulator, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, gave the go-ahead for operators last Friday to conduct pilot tests based on the world's two recognised 4G standards. One is the mainland-developed standard called time-division long-term evolution (TD-LTE), while the other is the more mature frequency-division duplex long-term evolution (FDD-LTE).

Ricky Lai, an analyst at Guotai Junan International, said the two operators were prepared to show "how 4G FDD-LTE networks are more stable and provide faster internet download speeds compared to the market leader's TD-LTE network".

China Mobile, the world's largest wireless network operator by number of subscribers, has led the way in signing up new subscribers on its TD-LTE network since the mainland's launch of 4G services in December. Unicom and China Telecom have been handicapped in fully supporting that standard because their respective 3G networks are technically geared to transition into FDD-LTE, which is widely deployed around the world.

At the end of May, China Mobile had 8.109 million 4G network subscribers out of its total user base of 787.295 million.

A Barclays report released yesterday said both Unicom and China Telecom were poised to sharpen their focus on acquiring subscribers in the 16 cities covered by their respective trials. These include Shanghai, Xian, Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Nanjing, Jinan, Shijiazhuang, Zhengzhou and Chongqing.