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China: 2006 Too Early for 3G Mobile

National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) macroeconomic research institute manager Wang Xueqing said the Chinese government should not issue 3G telecom licenses this year, reports The Beijing News. Wang said that 2006 is still too early to release licenses because the market is not mature, regardless of whether the standard is WCDMA, CDMA2000 or TD-SCDMA.

In other news, China Mobile announced that it recorded 4.07 million new users in January and reached 251 million users by the end of January. Only 119,000 of the new users are contract subscribers. China Unicom also announced that it registered 1.31 million new users in January and reached 129 million subscribers at the end of January.

Broken down, China Unicom had 96.06 million GSM users and 33.03 million CDMA users at the end of January, an increase of 990,000 and 316,000 new users from December, respectively. Prepaid users accounted for less than half of China Unicom's new GSM users while the majority of new CDMA users were contract subscribers.

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