China Telecom steps up foray into mobile market
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China Telecom steps up foray into mobile market
By Reuters staff
03 December 2001
China Telecom stepped further into the territory of China's two mobile carriers this year by offering a local wireless service in a prosperous city using the CDMA cellular standard, a company spokeswoman said on Monday.
China Telecom, China's near-monopoly fixed-line operator with ambition to offer a national mobile service, began offering a wireless service in the key market of Shenzhen, neighbouring Hong Kong.
While China Telecom already offers a city-bound service called "Little Smart" in about 500 Chinese cities, the Shenzhen service marked the first time it has used an independent network to offer wireless service, a spokeswoman told Reuters by telephone.
"This is a local service that we are developing in Shenzhen," she said. China Telecom's unit in Chengdu, central Sichuan's provincial capital, would begin offering the same service next year, she added.
Whereas the Little Smart service is built on top of existing fixed-line networks, the service in Shenzhen - called "Shihua Tong" - uses the Qualcomm Inc-owned Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) standard and is an independent network.
By using CDMA technology, a rival standard to the GSM standard popular in Europe and Asia, China Telecom has gone a step further in competing with licensed cellular carriers in Shenzhen.
China Unicom Ltd, China's second-largest mobile operator, plans to launch a service next year over its own 24 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) CDMA network it finished this year.
Like Little Smart, the Shihua Tong service makes use of a regulatory loophole by not offering national roaming and would compete with China's two mobile carriers, Unicom and China Mobile (HK) Ltd, in one city at a time.
PLANS MAY BE FOILED
However, China Telecom, which is due to be split into northern and southern firms, may see its plans foiled in Shenzhen and other cities where it plans to offer CDMA-based local wireless service next year when the industry regulator takes back the spectrum that carries the Shihua Tong service.
"Its frequency will be taken back in 2002," said a spokesman at the Ministry of Information Industry (MII), China's telecoms regulator.
The spokeswoman for China Telecom in Shenzhen declined to comment on the company's licensing status.
She said the fees for Shihua Tong were equal to fixed-line calls, or less than half the airtime charges of Unicom and China Mobile.
She declined to say how many people used the service in Shenzhen.
The handsets are produced by Samsung Electronics Co, the spokeswoman said.
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Anyone know the frequency being used?
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