China Telecom plans to complete upgrading of its CDMA network and capacity expansion in 340 Chinese cities, including Shanghai and Beijing, in the first half of next year, part of the 80 billion yuan (US$11.7 billion) it planned to invest to optimize its CDMA network in the next three years, the telco said yesterday.

China Telecom, which acquired China Unicom's CDMA (code division multiple access) business in the industry reorganization, will compete with rivals China Mobile and China Unicom through the upgraded networks, industry insiders said.

According to the plan, China Telecom will increase the speed of its CDMA wireless broadband from the current 153kbps (kilobit per second) to 1mbps (megabit per second) in the cities, triple the speed of China Mobile's TD-SCDMA (time division-synchronized CDMA) network.

"We are preparing the related construction and upgrading work," said a China Telecom Shanghai branch official, who declined to be identified.

Construction of the CDMA mobile network and business network has been progressing further ahead in five cities and areas, including Beijing, Fujian, Gansu, Guangxi and Chongqing than in other places.

China Telecom will increase the speed to 3mbps in the future, probably after 3G, or third generation, licenses have been issued by the government.

In the telecom industry reorganization, China Telecom acquired China Unicom's CDMA business, China Mobile acquired Tietong and China Unicom merged with China Netcom. After the reorganization, China will issue 3G licenses and about 280 billion yuan will be invested in the technology in the next two years, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

In November, China Mobile added 6.87 million new subscribers for a total of 450 million users, ranking it as No.1 by subscribers in the world. China Telecom, however, lost 430,000 CDMA users last month and it had a total of 27.9 million CDMA users by the end of last month.

(Shanghai Daily December 30, 2008)