The Chinese telecom market

IDC forecasts that the Chinese telecom market would grow at a CAGR of over 11% to $5.7bn by 2011, from $3.4bn in 2006. The market is healthy with four main competitors: China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom and China Netcom. Many new services have been introduced (fixed and mobile voice, SMS, WAP, ADSL, Cable, ...etc). They have massively invested in their networks up to now, and have succeeded to handle over 800m phone subscribers in about two decades. The weakest point today is the lack of integrated network management. Demand had surpassed what a rationalized, preplanned, network development could offer, so brought incoherences and operational difficulties in provisioning, power availability, or transport. The future 3G network infrastructure deployment is a real challenge for China in coming years, but no doubt that Chinese will overcome it.