WCDMA phones
Leading Chinese networking and telecommunications equipment supplier Huawei Technologies has won a 44% share in bidding for China Unicoms WCDMA network interface card procurement.
China Unicom started the first-round bidding invitation for terminals, including data cards, in April. Besides the bidding results for data cards, the telecom carrier is to unveil the results for mobile phone procurement before the end April.
China Unicom is scheduled to start 3G trial commercial services in 55 cities on May 17 and enlarge the coverage to 284 cities within 2009.
This is, as it were, the first major battle in the new 3G era.
China Unicom plans capital expenditure of RMB110 billion or so for 2009. Which is 56% up from RMB70.49 billion in 2008.
InfoTech.TMCnet.com reported that of the money, 35% will be used for the WCDMA network construction. Its WCDMA network is said to have downlink speeds up to 14.44 Mbit/s which is, of course, much faster than the current 2G.