China Mobile posted a 30 percent profit increase in 2008, to $16.53 billion. It had 457 million subscribers at year-end. The largest wireless carrier in China warned of uncertainty in 2009 from increasing wireless penetration, global recession and the restructuring of the Chinese telecom industry. Parallel with its 3G rollout, the operator is researching an upgrade path to Long Term Evolution technology. It will also keep looking for telecom assets overseas as investment opportunities.
Exports to China
China’s telecom industry posted 5.7 percent year-over- year profit growth in January, said the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. The number of fixed-line users in the country decreased 1 million to 34 million and the country added 8.5 million new mobile users in January. China had 650 million mobile subscribers at the end of January. Meanwhile, the number of broadband users grew 1.2 million from last year to 84.6 million in January, and the number of dial-up network users dropped 2.5 million to 11.8 million. The volume of fixed-line local calls shrank 17.1 percent and that of mobile phone calls grew 15.9 percent.
Eutelsat’s use of Chinese launchers for its satellites is “the beginning of a game of chicken” between itself and the Obama administration over technology transfer to “proliferators of weapons of mass destruction like the People’s Republic of China,” said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R- Calif. He spoke at a Science and Technology Committee hearing Wednesday on export controls and agreed reform of export control policies needs to happen to assure that high- tech exports “aren’t strangled by regulations.” But “we need to remain vigilant that our advanced technology doesn’t end up in the hands of nations who proliferate weapons of mass destruction,” he said. He noted that Eutelsat sells “tens of millions of dollars of satellite services” to the U.S. government.
Motorola said it will work with carriers on trials of TD-LTE in 2009, showing its commitment to the 4G technology to meet the needs of operators in China and global operators with TDD spectrum. Motorola said it’s planning an LTE ecosystem to support installations from Q4 2009 to mid-2010.
China Unicom is the most likely to win a deal with Apple to distribute the iPhone in China, research firm Ovum said. If Apple teams with China Mobile and a TD-SCDMA version of the iPhone is developed, China’s home-grown TD-SCDMA ecosystem could benefit from a new supporter. But a major obstacle remains as Apple may have to allow China Mobile some control over its application store. If a deal can be struck, China Unicom will probably launch the iPhone together with its 3G network in the first batch of cities in May 2009. However, China Unicom’s 3G network deployment is much further behind and slower than that of its peers. With the government’s support, by December 2008 China Mobile had already covered 10 cities with 340,000 TD-SCDMA subscribers. China Telecom is upgrading its CDMA network to 3G EV-DO. However, China Unicom must build a WCDMA network from scratch.
China Mobile added about 6.7 million mobile subscribers in January, boosting its total to 463.9 million, the company said Friday. Included were 226,000 TD-SCDMA users transferred to the carrier on a one-off basis, as it started to lease the TD networks from its parent company and started 3G operations this year.
China Telecom added 1.02 million new mobile subscribers in January, the company said Friday. But it lost 970,000 fixed-line customers, reducing the total to 207.4 million, as customers switched to cellphones. China Telecom bought China Unicom’s CDMA cellular operations last year as part of an industry restructuring. It had 28.9 million mobile subscribers by the end of January. The operator, which won a license earlier to run CDMA service, aims to add 35 million CDMA subscribers this year and have a total of over 100 million mobile users in 2010.
The FCC fielded more CableCARD activity last week. Massillon Cable TV asked for an extension of its waiver of the FCC’s ban on integrated security in set-top boxes. And the CEA asked the FCC to overturn a Media Bureau decision to grant Cablevision a temporary extension of its waiver until it can introduce a downloadable security system. Massillon had pledged to convert to an all-digital system by Feb. 17 in securing its last waiver, but it ran into set-top box supply issues brought on by production delays associated with China hosting the Summer Olympics and problems with the some of the boxes’ power supplies. Massillon had to stop marketing the all-digital switch to customers until if could get reliable equipment, and recalled some 70,000 power supplies that were already in customer homes, it said. Meanwhile, the CEA said Cablevision’s waiver extension violated the Administrative Procedures Act; it adopted a substantive rule change without the opportunity for public comment. “The bureau has changed the rationale for the previous waiver: from granting more time to move to some compliant system, to ordering Cablevision to move to a system as to which the bureau admits that it has insufficient information to determine compliance,” CEA said.
Starling Advanced Communications is taking the knowledge it gained from developing aviation satellite antennas and converting that for use on emergency medical services and homeland security vehicles, said Jacob Keret, vice president of marketing and sales. “We took advantage of the coherent multi-panel antenna (CoMPATM) technology and leveraged it for the land mobile market,” Keret said in an interview. The new antennas, named StarCar, will be introduced at next month’s Satellite 2009, he said.
Panelists at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, urged governments worldwide to focus on mobile broadband stimulus. They urged the rollout of mobile broadband to drive economic growth. “For mobile broadband to be a mass-market service worldwide and powerful engine of economic growth, the mobile industry needs both a stable regulatory climate and access to the right spectrum on the right terms,” said GSMA CEO Rob Conway. Governments need to allocate the same chunks of spectrum as other countries in their region, enabling equipment manufacturers to gain economies of scale by producing mobile broadband handsets, computers and other devices that will work in many different markets, he said. The rollout and operation of 3G networks in China will create 300,000 jobs, said China Mobile Chairman Jianzhou Wang. 3G investments will directly boost the development of telecom manufacturing and 3G handsets and applications will increase consumer spending, he said. Mobile broadband is essential for socio-economic growth and, with Long-Term Evolution, the industry has a true global standard, said Carl-Henric Svanberg, CEO of Ericsson. The deployment of mobile broadband is particularly important for closing the digital divide and the allocation of low frequency spectrum is a prerequisite, he said.