Carrier Wrap: China carriers look to form infrastructure JV; UAE’s Etisalat sells African operations

Editor’s Note: Wireless operators are a busy bunch, and as such RCR Wireless News will attempt to gather some of the important announcements that may slip through the cracks from the world’s largest carriers in a weekly wrap-up. Enjoy!
China’s three dominate wireless operators – China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom – have acknowledged they were in negotiations for form a “base station company” that would “enhance the sharing of resources for the development of telecommunications infrastructure and lower operating costs and the costs for developing telecommunications networks,” according to China Mobile.
While details of the negotiations were not released, it’s believed that the three operators are looking at ways to share LTE infrastructure across mobile sites. A Chinese publication, Caijing, explained that the joint venture would be capitalized by the three operators, would initially look to install new base stations and then lease capacity to the three operators, and finally would acquire current sites owned by the three operators.
Analysts noted such an agreement would be most beneficial to China Unicom and China Telecom, which combined have roughly half the subscribers of China Mobile.
“China Mobile has up to 380,000 towers (based on an urban 4G roll-out of 500,000 sites and a 2G network totaling 880,000 sites),” explained Caroline Gabriel, research director at Maravedis-Rethink. “The other two have fewer towers, but would benefit through access to [China] Mobile’s larger network, especially because there would be reduced need to build out sites in rural areas. [China] Unicom and [China] Telecom are significantly weaker than their larger competitor in rural regions, and have struggled with the economics of covering relatively sparse population, and a tower sharing deal could reduce this advantage for the leader.”
China Mobile recently launched TDD-LTE services as part of a $7 billion project, while its smaller rivals have yet to launch their FDD-LTE services.
–United Arab Emirates-based Etisalat announced this week that it had signed a deal to sell its operations in Benin, the Central African Republic, Gabon, the Ivory Coast, Niger and Togo to Maroc Telecom for approximately $650 million.
Etisalat currently has operations across more than a dozen countries in the Middle East and Africa, and counted approximately 141 million total customers at the end of last year.
–Korea’s SK Telecom said it has started deploying base stations tapping into the carrier’s 10 megahertz of spectrum in the 2.1 GHz band in a handful of markets, with plans to eventually use those assets to operate three-band LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation.
The LTE-A network will be able to run a total of 40 megahertz of downlink spectrum across the 800 MHz, 1.8 GHz and 2.1 GHz bands to provide network speeds of up to 300 megabits per second. The carrier said it expects device support for such an offering later this year, and in the meantime will use multi-carrier technology to route data traffic across the three separate spectrum bands.
SK Telecom announced earlier this year announced the carrier aggregation plans. At the Mobile World Congress event, SK Telecom demonstrated LTE-Advanced tri-band carrier aggregation designed to support theoretical network speeds up to 450 megabits per second, which it claims is the highest achieved by a FD-LTE operator. The tri-band deployment relied on 60 megahertz of combined spectrum across three separate bands.
–Regional telecommunications operator C Spire is set today to begin construction in Mississippi on its one gigabit-per-second fiber-to-the-home project designed to provide high-speed broadband services to markets across the state. The initial nine launch markets include Batesville, Clinton, Corinth, Hattiesburg, Horn Lake, McComb, Quitman, Ridgeland and Starkville.
The fiber offering is set to include Internet service priced at $80 per month; Internet and home phone service for $100 per month; Internet and television service for $140 per month; or Internet, home phone and television service for $160 per month. C Spire wireless customers would be eligible for a $10 discount per month.
Additional carrier news can be found on the RCR Wireless News “Carriers” page.
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