In an interview with Xinhua during the on-going 3G World Congress 2001 in Hong Kong, Ho said China Mobile and China Unicom, the two mobile phone operators in China, will not take aggressive steps in developing 3G technology, but watching closely their European counterparts at the same time.

Following the burst of the Internet bubble, the European mobile phone operators met with some negative impacts in developing 3G mobile technology, such as high cost and insufficient investment, he said.

Ho pointed out that China's existing mobile phone operators own telecommunications networks with a capacity large enough for voice subscribers expansion, so they will not be so eager to develop the new 3G network like that in Europe, where the network frequency was not enough in big cities.

But the 3G is the direction in the development of the wireless technology, and China will also develop the network, he said.

He said China's Ministry of Information Industry plans to start testing the UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) solution for the 3G network in laboratory in the third quarter of this year and the test may last for 15 months.

China will not have the 3G network in operation by the end of next year or at the beginning of 2003, he estimated, adding that China may have a mature wireless multimedia market in 2005.

He forecasts China has a large market potential in wireless telecommunications, with the number of mobile phone subscribers to increase 200 million to 300 million in 2005.

Some 20 to 30 percents of the Chinese mobile phone subscribers are expected to be 3G users, he added.

He pointed out that the demand for high-speed access to the Internet and data applications anytime, anywhere are still rising and the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) evolution strategy enables wireless operators to have low cost and create profits.

Ho revealed that Nortel has signed a contract valued at 275 million U.S. dollars with China Unicom last month to get CDMA equipment for its national digital cellular network which can reach 2.66 million users. China Unicom also signed CDMA contracts worth 200 million U.S. dollars with Ericsson in May.

China market is huge enough to have more than two mobile phone operators, he said, and for those new operators, the 3G is the only way to enter into the market at a low cost.

(People's Daily 06/14/2001)