In the sort of cloak and dagger conditions more usually reserved for the clandestine doings of security services spooks than the telco industry, last week more than a hundred China Telecom executives and researchers from all over the People's Republic held a secret meeting with senior representatives of six CDMA vendors at Beijing's Tangshan Holiday Conference Centre.

The ostensible purpose of the hush-hush gathering was to test and evaluate the effectiveness of one set of equipment against another for the next phase of China Telecom's CDMA network deployment.

Well-placed sources say that China Telecom officials from the carrier's Beijing Research Institute, Shanghai Research Institute and various provincial operations met with representatives from Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, ZTE, Nortel, Motorola and Samsung to evaluate equipment for a total of 81 tenders, which include solutions for rolling out EV-DO capabilities.

Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, ZTE, Samsung and Nortel have submitted bids for all 81 tenders while Motorola has reportedly submitted 39 bids.

Negotiations with the vendors are continuing and it is thought that an official announcement naming the successful bidders will be announced sometime this week.

The successful bidders will provide equipment and knowhow to upgrade of China Telecom’s newly-acquired CDMA network with EV-DO. China Telecom is expected to conduct EV-DO trials in two or three so-fer unnamed Chinese cities later this year and on through into 2009.

China Telecom has allocated CAPEX budget of 80 billion yuan (US$11.7bn) for the CDMA project over the course of the next  three years with a first phase investment of 27.9 billion yuan ($4bn).

Source:telecomtv