According to several sources, the MIIT will issue FDD LTE trial network licenses to China Unicom and China Telecom this Friday, allowing them to carry out trial integration of networking of FDD LTE and TD-LTE in 16 key mainland cities and provide the corresponding 4G services. But China Mobile will certainly miss the FDD LTE trial license .
This means that, China Unicom and China Telecom will be allowed to conduct scale development and construction of FDD LTE network in the 16 cities permitted and 4G network performance of the two operators will be improved significantly.
In addition, as the 4G commercial service based on FDD LTE has been launched for many years in foreign countries, and the available devices are relatively mature, so once China Unicom and China Telecom obtain the FDD LTE trial network licenses, they are able to provide 4G FDD LTE devices in the market immediately.
Insiders generally believe that, despite the issued licenses are not formal commercial licenses, China Unicom and China Telecom could still take advantage of this opportunity and reverse the unfavorable situation of the present market.
According to the subscriber statistics of the first five months released by the three major operators, 4G service subscribers of China Mobile increased rapidly, at present the number has reached 8.109 million; however, mobile subscribers of China Telecom cumulatively decreased 4.36 million from January to May; although there’s no loss of 3G subscribers of China Unicom, growth rate declined sharply compared with last year.
However, it is unclear when will MIIT issue the formal FDD LTE commercial licenses, earlier media reports said that MIIT would issue the formal licenses in the third quarter of this year, but the news has not been confirmed.