Chinese 3G To Be Huge, Analyst Says

There could be as many as 118 million subscribers to 3G data services in China by 2008, market research firm In-Stat/MDR said Tuesday.

One reason for the large number of 3G subscribers is the large number of wireless subscribers in general in that country, the research firm said. There currently are about 268 million wireless subscribers and that will grow at a rate of almost 12 percent a year, according to the study.

3G services such as CDMA2000 and W-CDMA will start being widely available in that country in 2005 and subscribers will grow rapidly, reaching 118 million by 2008, the study predicted. GSM networks will continue to dominate in China, the study noted, with China Mobile being, by far, the largest wireless carrier.

However, the second-place carrier, China Unicom will expand its CDMA network and both will face increasing competition from new operators, according to the study.

The competition -- tied with customer demand -- mean that operators will roll out 3G services faster than they'd like, according to the study."As in most regions of the world where cellular subscriber rates are rapidly increasing, the implementation of 3G in China is critical in order to accommodate a transformation of users' expectations from voice-centric communications to a more complex mixture of voice, wireless data and multimedia services," report author Tina Xu said in a statement.