Skip to main content

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.

Popular posts from this blog

Frontier AI Peaked. Here's What Comes Next

The prevailing narrative around artificial intelligence (AI) has been one of relentless scale. Bigger models, bigger clusters, bigger budgets. The assumption, largely unchallenged until recently, was that raw parameter count translated directly into competitive advantage. New research from Omdia suggests it's time to retire that assumption. According to the latest market study by Omdia, parameter growth in frontier AI models has slowed to around 5 percent annually since 2021, a stark contrast to the more than hundredfold expansion seen between 2019 and 2021. Enterprise AI Market Development For executives who have been making infrastructure and investment decisions based on the assumption that AI would keep demanding ever-larger, ever-more-expensive hardware, this finding deserves serious attention. The race to the top of the model size leaderboard has, at least for now, plateaued. Crucially, Omdia's analysts are not reading this as an AI winter. Alexander Harrowell, senior pri...