Government says licences will be awards by January 2009 at the latest.
China's ministry for industry and information technology has moved to counter fears that the country's 3G market may never get off the ground by assuring industry leaders that it would soon be awarding licences.Xi Guohua, vice minister for industry and information technology, said "the time is ripe in principle for issuing 3G licences," when speaking to a gathering of execs in Beijing yesterday.
He added that government reform of China's telecoms market through a series of mergers and acquisitions was "basically completed", though did not give an exact timetable for 3G rollout.
Only this week it was reported that implementation of 3G was being held up by the governments insistence on use of the TD-SCDMA standard, thought by many to be an inferior network technology to the WCDMA and CDMA2000 technologies adopted overseas.
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