Three-year investment aims to increase connections and speed while cutting service costs
China’s State Council this week announced plans to boost Internet speeds nationwide, while also cutting costs, in a three-year program reportedly worth a staggering $182 billion.
In a policy statement, the State Council noted “there is still a huge gap between China’s network speed and international standards as well as the expectations of the Chinese people. There are also issues such as high network fees and unbalanced development in rural and urban areas, and limited quality of services.”
Per the plan, construction of LTE and fiber-optic networks will be accelerated; more than 80 million homes and 10,000 villages will get hooked up to fiber in 2015, and an additional 14,000 villages will receive broadband coverage. Planned spending is projected at around $69 billion this year, and an additional $112 billion over 2016 and 2017.
The State Council is targeting completion of 1.3 million LTE base stations by the end of the year to support more than 300 million 4G subscribers.
“By the end of 2017, all households in locations above prefecture level will have access to 100 [megabit per second] fiber-optic networks, over 80% of villages will be covered by fiber-optic networks, all cities and villages will be covered by 4G networks, and broadband speeds in municipalities and provincial capitals will reach 30 Mbps,” the State Council stated.
Mobile World Live reports that China’s broadband speed is ranked No. 80 globally. Akami Technologies found China’s average Internet speed was 3.4 Mbps compared to the worldwide average of 4.5 Mbps.
Reuters reports that the planned investment could be a boon for equipment manufacturers, name-checking Ericsson and the merged Nokia Alcatel-Lucent company, as well as homegrown hardwaremaker Huawei.
A statement from China’s State Information Center said, “There is still not enough competition, which has led to telecoms fees being relatively high while there is still a lot of room to improve the quality of service.”
China has three state-sanctioned mobile network operators: China Mobile (the largest), China Telecom and China Unicom. The three companies operate a joint venture called China Tower that constructs, manages and builds towers and other network infrastructure components.
