China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has awarded three licences for 3G services. This is expected to lead to investments of around 280 billion yuan in network upgradation and expansion over the next two years. China Mobile has got a licence to deploy 3G networks based on TD-SCDMA, and China Unicom and China Telecom have been granted licences for WCDMA and CDMA2000 respectively. Meanwhile, China Mobile is reported to be working on the launch of its third-phase construction tender for TD-SCDMA networks in 162 cities. The company is expected to open the tenders soon, and announce the winners at the end of March 2009.
