Sunday May 30, 5:39 am Eastern Time
China Unicom to takeover army's telecom
ventures
BEIJING, May 30 (Reuters) - Chinese regulators have given the country's
second telecommunications carrier permission to take control of four
mobile phone networks partly owned by the People's Liberation Army,
state media said on Sunday.
''The Ministry of Information Industry recently authorised China Unicom to take over these trial systems,'' the
China Daily Business Weekly said.
China Great Wall Networks, a 50-50 venture owned by the PLA and the country's near-monopoly player China
Telecom, have operated the CDMA trial networks in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Guangzhou.
In a push to promote domestic competition in the sector, Beijing this year has authorised China Unicom to spend
seven billion yuan ($845 million) on rolling out networks using the U.S.-backed CDMA (Code Division Multiple
Access) techology.
A takeover of the Great Wall networks, which have a combined subscriber capacity of about 60,000, would make
China Unicom the country's sole CDMA provider. European GSM (Global Sytem for Mobile Communications) is
the dominant standard in China.
It was unclear whether the PLA, which was officially banned last year from engaging in commercial business,
would retain a stake in the networks. The army controls the 800 MHz bandwidth on which CDMA operates.
Consultations between regulators, China Unicom and Great Wall ''could be very complicated,'' the newspaper
quoted a senior Unicom official as saying.
New contracts over the next two years to provide Unicom's planned 12 million-subscriber capacity CDMA
network would be awarded to two or three foreign equipment vendors, the article said.
''One supplier is unlikely to be able to meet such a high capacity demand, so two or three are reasonable,'' it
quoted the Unicom official as saying.
Chinese and foreign executives said last month that U.S. firms Lucent Technologies (NYSE:LU - news) and
Motorola (NYSE:MOT - news) were poised to split the lion's share of the deals, with Canada's Nortel (NYSE:NRT
- news), Sweden's Ericsson and South Korea's Samsung bidding for remaining contracts.
More Quotes
and News:
Lucent Technologies Inc (NYSE:LU - news)
Motorola Inc (NYSE:MOT - news)
Nortel Inversora SA (NYSE:NRT - news)
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