After MIIT finally issued FDD LTE licenses to China Telecom and China Unicom, informed sources revealed to C114 that China Unicom LTE phase II network main equipment bidding has ended recently.
This bidding covers 143 cities with about 50,000 base stations in the construction scale, finally 5 equipment vendors won the bidding and gained shares. Huawei obtained the biggest share as expected, due to the advantage of biggest share in the phase I bidding, ZTE and Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell won the second and third place, respectively. But as we have learnt, the first and second winners had a large gap in the shares. In addition, overseas vendors also made good performance, winning about 30% of the total share in the LTE phase II main equipment bidding.
As China Unicom has completed bidding of 201 cities in the last round, it means that China Unicom has completed LTE construction bidding in 344 cities after the phase II round, which means the "double 4G, double 100M" strategic target of China Unicom has speeded up to be achieved. According to this source, China Unicom will continue to expand the construction scale in the existing 4G regions, which means to extend the leading brand from 3G era to 4G era, and bring the most competitive mobile broadband experience to subscribers of China Unicom.
2014 is the first year of 4G construction in China, it can be predicted that with the maturity of 4G network of China Telecom and China Unicom, the domestic 4G market competition will become more intensely in 2015.