One of the unexpected side-effects of this global recession is the way it is catapulting China to become the most important telecoms market in the world. The combined effect of a slowdown of Capex investment across US & Europe, with the Chinese government driven Capex investment program of ~$50bn/year for the next two years, means that a staggering 50% of the global annual telecoms capex investment over the next two years will come from China.
And this may have a significant impact on the decisions around LTE. As I mentioned in last weeks blog, LTE looks like the great hope for finally unifying mobile communications across the globe. China Mobile is a strong adherent of the TD-LTE variety and this level of investment $$ will certainly steer the suppliers thinking. Things are moving very fast in this market. Crucially, the service demand is now emerging to consume the sort of bit rates that LTE is promising (~100Mb/s downlink).
Market sentiment seems to be that China will try to rapidly leapfrog 3G and move as rapidly as possible to 4G, putting it not only in the Capex pole position, but perhaps also in the pole position for global telecoms sophistication!!
Posted
03-18-2009 3:41 AM
by
Martin Creaner