The Chinese mobile infrastructure market came to US$11.1 billion in 2014, a 51 percent jump over 2013, according to technology market research firm Infonetics Research. The mobile infrastructure spending was led by W-CDMA network expansion at China Unicom and robust TD-LTE eNodeB deployments at China Mobile.
China's mobile operators added 58 million mobile subscribers in 2014, pushing the number of total subscribers to 1.3 billion. Around 60 percent of these are on China Mobile's network. China Mobile blew up its own target of TD-LTE rollouts, ending the year with 720,000 TD-LTE eNodeBs. That's 570,000 above last year and well in excess of its own plan of bringing the footprint up to 500,000, illustrating China Mobile's commitment to exit the TD-SCDMA era as fast as possible, according to Infonetics Research.
Stéphane Téral, Research Director for mobile infrastructure and carrier economics at Infonetics Research
Looking at mobile capex, China delivered again in 2014 via a balancing act that had China Telecom cutting capex by nearly a third, China Unicom increasing spending by almost a quarter and China Mobile shelling out more than the two combined.
