China’s Minister of Industry and Information Technology, Li Yizhong, said that the country’s leading operator, China Mobile, is expected to have up to 80 million 3G subscribers within the next two years.
This is despite the fact that the world’s largest mobile operator in terms of number of subscribers is using China’s own TD-SCDMA standard, which according to the industry isn’t developed as WCDMA and CDMA2000 standards. On that note, it’s worth pointing out that the 80 million is lower than the earlier number of 100 million subscribers, which was claimed by Lu Dongfeng, vice-president of Datang Telecom Technology, a provider of TD-SCDMA products.
Lou Qinjian, vice-minister of industry and information technology, also earlier told the China Daily news agency that TD-SCDMA subscribers in China are expected to reach 10 million by the end of this year.
For the record, China Mobile plans to spend around $8.6 billion during 2009 on rolling out its 3G network, deploying some 60,000 base stations in 238 cities in the process.
[Via: WSJ]