"Currently, we will give full support to China Unicom's construction of its new mobile phone network, the CDMA network, through the effort of our eight manufacturing joint ventures throughout the country," said Scott Erickson, senior vice-chairman of Lucent Technologies for international mobility segment.

On May 15 this year, China Unicom signed contracts worth 12.1 billion yuan (US$1.45 billion) with 10 telecom firms, including four top international firms -- Lucent, Motorola, Nortel and Ericsson. Lucent won the largest share of the project through its Chinese joint ventures.

"If everything goes according to plan, the new network will be completed by October 2001, covering 200 cities throughout China with a network capacity reaching 13.3 million subscribers," Erickson told reporters when attending the 3G World Congress, which is being held in Hong Kong from June 12 to June 15.

According to Erickson, Lucent's investment in China's telecom sector has been increased by at least 20 percent annually over the past years. This year, the company has signed agreements of over US$800 million with its Chinese counterparts in supply of products in optical fiber cables, optical networks, wireless and data transmission.

Lucent, which spun off from AT&T in 1996, set its office in China as early as in 1985, and it has now over 4,800 employees in the country. "We have remained the leading foreign telecom firm in China's telecom market for many years," Erickson said.

On the deployment of 3G technology in China, Erickson predicted that it needs two or three years for the technology to become commercialized. He said his company would work hard to provide technical and funding assistance to the development of TD-SCDMA technology, which is still under research and development in China.

(xinhua 06/18/2001)