China Mobile's parent company, China Mobile Communications Corp (CMCC) has reportedly been given to expand its trial 3G network to a nationwide basis. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has "approved a plan by CMCC to expand its current TD-SCDMA commercial trial network (in select cities) to a nationwide basis", a ministry spokesman told China Daily.

CMCC is currently running trials of the Chinese 3G standard, TD-SCDMA in eight cities and has previously said that it plans to expand that to an unspecified number of cities.

The company has already invested some US$2 billion on its trial network - and is expected to get a formal 3G license within the next few months. There have been some observations that China Mobile is getting a leap on its 3G rollout over its GSM and CDMA rivals - but this could be in part as compensation for being forced to use the home-grown technology. The other GSM and CDMA networks are expected to migrate to CDMA and W-CDMA based 3G services.

A CMCC spokesman confirmed that the group has already received the formal approval from the MIIT but insisted it "doesn't mean a 3G license has been issued".

China Mobile Communications is also understood to be planning a tender for this second phase of its TD-SCDMA network rollout, but not until next month.

China's CCID Consulting issued a report earlier this year which predicted that the country would have 51 million TD-CDMA subscribers by 2011. CCID Consulting forecast that after an introduction period of deployment in 2008, TD-SCDMA will enter a peak period of deployment between 2009 and 2011.

China Mobile was recently granted permission to use phone numbers which start with 188 for its 3G trial network. In China, and much of Asia the number eight is deemed to be lucky so granting the 188 prefix to China's own 3G standard could be a subtle boost to build up subscriber interest.

Source: China Daily