BEIJING—Qualcomm Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Irwin Jacobs expects China Unicom’s CDMA network to have 3 to 4 million users by the end of the year. Subscribers are slow to migrate from the GSM network to the CDMA network because they need to buy new handsets and cannot transfer their existing mobile-phone numbers.
Location-based services and an upgrade to 1x technology, which promises higher data transfer rates, could provide incentives to high-end users to make the switch, Jacobs told Reuters.
China Unicom’s CDMA network has a capacity of 15.5 million users.
