HK Chinese Broadband

Hong Kong: Chinese Broadband Wireless

Posted by samc on July 3rd, 2007

Hong Kong marked 10 years since the end of British rule yesterday with parades and protests that “vividly illustrated its role as China’s beacon of political diversity”.

Many in Hong Kong believe the next 10 years will be full of tough challenges for the 7 million people living in this global business center on China’s muggy southern coast.

They fear Singapore and Shanghai will seize a bigger chunk of the city’s key businesses, such as shipping and financial services.

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government has a plan. They want to develop a “knowledge-based” economy, and announced plans to invest some HK$210 million (US$27 million) to build a free Hong Kong-wide WiFi network, explains Tech News.

The Hong Kong Broadcast Network is in the midst of expanding its triple-play Metro Ethernet IP network and services to reach a targeted 95 percent of the SAR’s population — some 2 million households and 1,800 commercial buildings. China Unicom, the country’s No. 2 mobile phone carrier, said Tuesday it has started testing a music download service offering subscribers songs from 23 record companies.

The government plans to invest HK$50 million (US$6.4 million) in various high-density residential areas of Hong Kong this year to develop more than 1,000 WiFi hotspots, offering wireless broadband connectivity as a community service to the public, said Wai Kay “Ricky” Wong, chairman and cofounder of City Telecom (HK).

“We are very excited to learn that the government would be investing in a free-to-all WiFi wireless broadband network,” Wong said, “as our neighbors, such as Taiwan and Singapore — with their governments’ support — have already developed into wireless broadband cities. Each now enables over 10,000 hot spots.”

China GrenTech has won the bid to supply WiFi gear for China Mobile’s Olympic WLAN network. GrenTech will provide customized 802.11a/b/g WiFi gear and will also participate in the design and construction of the Olympic WLAN network.

Beijing is testing the Olympic wireless information service which will be available in the seven languages. The 2008 Olympics, hosted by China, open August 8, next year.

WiMax at 2.5 GHz is foreseen to be a key enabler in the future. The Hong Kong government will assign broadband spectrum using a market-based approach, based on auction, planned to be conducted in 2008.

According to Wikipedia, China has 370 million land lines and 480 million cellular users (March 2007). China Mobile is the world’s largest mobile phone operator — ranked by number of subscribers — with over 296 million customers. It was spun off from former monopoly China Telecom in 2000. China Unicom is 52.6% held by the state-owned China Unicom Group, while the remainder is traded on the Hong Kong and New York stock exchanges. As of the end of May 2007, the company had 111 million GSM subscribers and 39 million CDMA subscribers.

In the U.S., mobile WiMAX service will be provided by Sprint and Clearwire (at 2.5 GHz and Horizon Wi-Com (at 2.3GHz) Unlicensed fixed frequencies (at 5.8 GHz) are also available as well as “lightly regulated” 3.5 GHz, where companies don’t have to pay for the two bands of 25MHz each, but do have to register their networks.

source : dailywireless.org