According to the official news from China Telecom, the centralized procurement of LTE-FDD wireless main equipment in the second phase of China Telecom LTE hybrid networking test has ended recently.
5 enterprises have won the bids, namely Huawei, ZTE, Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell and Ericsson. According to the informed sources, competition of the bidding prices were very fierce in this round, judging from the overall pattern, ZTE and Huawei still accounted for more than half of the share, but the final result wasn’t settled and changes may happen in the end.
Like the last round of centralized procurement, China Telecom kept an ultra-fast rhythm and finished the bidding and centralized procurement in two months, on the hand, this also reflected China Telecom’s craving for LTE-FDD network.
China Telecom officially started bidding for the phase II of LTE hybrid networking test in November of last year, mainly including related macro cellular base stations, BBU+RRU, OMC-R and other network elements. According to China Telecom’s ‘official’ positioning of LTE phase II network, it will complete deployment of TDD network in the key cities, build up the TDD/FDD hybrid networking test network, strengthen the TDD/FDD hybrid networking ability, compatibility and interoperability tests of 4G/3G/2G networks, business bearing capability test, inter provincial and international roaming test and others.
But in the actual process, China Telecom apparently hopes to launch commercial LTE network as soon as possible, so as to get rid of the competition disadvantages in the market. But as the director, MIIT hasn’t yet issued the national FDD LTE licenses, which only allows China Telecom to develop LTE hybrid networking scale tests in 56 cities in a slow pace.
In the first round of bidding of China Telecom LTE network, 10 enterprises received tenders and 8 of them have won shares in the final. But what needs to be pointed out is that some enterprises got shares of TD-LTE network, including Datang Mobile. Because this revealed result was of FDD equipment bidding, it’s normal that the other enterprises are not in the list.
However, it needs to be pointed out that the first two rounds of bidding are both of small scales, which is not enough to completely determine the pattern of equipment suppliers, so there is still a chance for newcomers. In the 3G era of China Telecom, there were only three suppliers, namely Huawei, ZTE and Shanghai Bell, for Ericsson and Nokia, there are still opportunities.