China Unicom said yesterday that its total mobile subscriber base rose slightly to 640,000 in September but its number of users for the CDMA (code division multiple access) network continued to decline last month.

Subscribers for China Unicom's CDMA service dropped 626,000 last month to 41.73 million. In the first nine months, it lost 19.5 million CDMA users.

China Unicom, the country's No. 2 mobile carrier, had 130.73 million subscribers for its GSM (global system for mobile communications) services at the end of September, up from 129.46 million at the end of August.

The release of the user numbers yesterday marked the last time China Unicom would do so as it officially merged with China Netcom last week and was in the process to transfer its CDMA network to China Telecom as part of the country's telecommunications industry restructuring which started in June. The revamp also included dominant carrier China Mobile merging with China Tietong.

China Telecom has started to operate the CDMA network from this month and it hoped to attract more users.

China Telecom, the country's largest fixed-line phone carrier, said it would invest 80 billion yuan (US$11.76 billion) on the CDMA network it got from China Unicom in the next two or three years.

China Telecom predicted the CDMA subscriber number would hit 100 million by the end of next year, double the current level.

"China Telecom can move faster and, therefore, save costs to upgrade the (acquired) CDMA network for 3G services, compared with China Mobile's TD-SCDMA (time division-synchronous code division multiple access) network," Charice Wang, an analyst at consulting firm Ovumt, said in a note.

(Shanghai Daily October 21, 2008)