China Wireless News

China is now the largest mobile economy by numbers of users despite a slow start – it only rolled out 3G from 2008 and 3G penetration remains fairly low. The country restructured its telecoms operators to create three fixed/wireless carriers and this change has stimulated growth along with the much delayed auctions of 3G spectrum. China Mobile is the market leader but in 3G, is seeing its lead squeezed by its rivals, partly because it was forced to use the home-grown technology, TD-SCDMA, which has limited ecosystem. The second player is China Unicom, which uses W-CDMA and is forming partnerships with operators outside China, such as Telefonica. China Mobile is also outward looking and forming strategic alliances, notably with Vodafone and Verizon, which will help spur its plans to move quickly to the TD-LTE standard for 4G services. The third cellco is China Telecom, which focuses on the CDMA platform. China is also becoming a key country on the vendor side, with Huawei challenging Ericsson for leadership of the infrastructure business and ZTE growing rapidly in handsets. These suppliers are helping China in its goal of becoming more self-sufficient in technology and patents.