China Unicom to Kick off WCDMA Procurement Late September

SHENZHEN, Sep 25, 2008 (SinoCast China IT Watch via COMTEX) -- CHU | Quote | Chart | News | PowerRating -- China Unicom is reportedly to kick off new round of procurement for WCDMA telecom equipment in late September. It plans to buy 60,000 to 70,000 wireless WCDMA base stations.

In the meanwhile, China Mobile is also procuring 23,000 wireless TD-SCDMA base stations via public bidding, which will be used for network construction in 28 cities around the country.

Under the national telecom restructuring scheme, China Unicom integrated with China Netcom by selling its CDMA business and network to China Telecom, but keeping its GSM business. So it is a must for China Unicom to upgrade its GSM network to WCDMA.

Among all the WCDMA telecom equipment providers, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens are the top-ranking players. And the battle for the contracts between Ericsson and Huawei Technologies is getting fiercer.

China Unicom will at the soonest kick off WCDMA network construction at the end of this year and is scheduled to invite bidding for WCDMA equipment procurement contracts in this November, according to an executive from the telecom carrier.

First it will set up WCDMA network in some provinces in Southern China and then extend it nationwide, according to previous reports. However, the executive says that China Unicom will start networking around the country at the same time.

China Unicom requests that all of its provincial branches can only procure telecom equipments that work both for 2G and 3G standards. These equipments can be upgraded to WCDMA directly. That means once China Unicom gets the 3G license, its branches will kick off WCDMA-based 3G services immediately.

At the moment, branches of China Unicom in Jiangsu and Ningxia are providing their employees with 3G networking construction training courses.

In the long run, experts point out that China Unicom is likely to be the fourth largest telecom carrier in the world in terms of subscribers after it puts an end to the merger with China Netcom.

The latest financial report released by China Unicom shows that the new China Unicom will possess mobile, fixed-line, broadband Internet access, data, and value-added telecom services. And it will probably get the WCDMA license. And broadband multimedia and 3G services will be the main driving force of the telecom carrier in years ahead.

After the telecom resturcturing, the new China Unicom will have 18,000 sales outlets, with 600,00 base stations and 5.74 million kilometers of long-distance cable.

From dycj.ynet.com, Page 1, Wednesday, September 24, 2008 info@SinoCast.com

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