China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) aims at 150 million subscribers of 3G communication services in the China market in 2011, a difficult goal viewing that there were 42.611 million subscribers at the end of November 2010, according to a report by China-based CBN Daily.
The 3G user base at the end of November consisted of 18.835 million TD-SCDMA subscribers for China Mobile, 12.776 million WCDMA ones for China Unicom and 11 million CDMA 2000 ones for China Telecom, the paper said.
While the user base is expected to grow to 45 million users at the end of 2010, the MIIT target necessitates an average monthly addition of three million subscribers for each of the three mobile telecom carriers, the paper noted. However, China Mobile and China Unicom saw monthly growth of 1.854 million and 1.12 million subscribers respectively on average during January-November 2010.
Particularly for TD-SCDMA, MIIT has set a goal of reaching 50 million subscribers in three years, the paper added.