BEIJING—Following a three-month trial period, China Unicom launched commercial services on its CDMA network on 8 April.
The trial period went less smoothly than the company had hoped, as it failed to convince potential customers of the advantages of CDMA over GSM. A lack of handsets further complicated a fast increase in its customer base. In February, for example, only 9,000 users signed up for the CDMA services versus 1.1 million for China Unicom’s GSM network.
The Chinese government gave licenses to 19 companies to produce CDMA handsets. Motorola (China) is the only foreign supplier among them. Most waited to start mass production of CDMA handsets in anticipation of satisfactory subscriber growth, further increasing the network’s difficulties.
Recently, China Unicom decided to order 500,000 handsets through its subsidiary Shanghai Guomai to lease under favorable conditions to customers signing up for long-term service plans.
China Unicom said it added 280,000 subscribers between 18 March and 7 April. The total number of CDMA users now is 800,000, but 500,000 were forced to transfer from a defunct military-owned network.
