LTE into new power, move to overtake

March 15, China Mobile released its 2011-year earnings. Compared with previous years of rapid growth, China's mobile in 2011 to achieve absolute growth, while still not out of the relatively slow growth period. Income growth continued to slow, capital expenditure continued to increase, and earnings pressure increased.

The results show that 2011 China Mobile has a net increase of 65.55 million users, the size of users to 650 million, 3G users over 51 million, the huge investment of 3G network has gradually begun to play a role. Li, China Mobile's chief executive, said in a performance briefing that China Mobile's 3G network utilization rate was 9.9% in 2010 and rose to 13.8% last year, hoping to surpass 15% this year. To that end, China Mobile will continue to attract users in the form of mobile phone subsidies.

ARPU value, according to China Mobile voice business average monthly income per household (ARPU) 71 yuan, this compared to 2010 of 73 Yuan, 2009 77 yuan continued to decline. While the voice business continues to show growth, China Mobile, for the first time in its annual report, has disclosed the growth of its data business, which has proved to be a bright spot for China Mobile's revenue.

WLAN Power

In its 2011 earnings, China Mobile, the first to disclose data business growth, accounted for a 24.9% increase in data business from 2010 to 26.4% this year, with wireless internet revenues up 45% from a year earlier, accounting for 8.4% of operating income. It is noteworthy that this is the first time that China Mobile has disclosed data in its annual earnings report.

In the data disclosed by China Mobile, WLAN accounted for a significant increase in the number of wireless Internet services or business traffic. In terms of business revenue, WLAN revenue grew from 191 million yuan in 2010 to 739 million yuan in 2011, with a growth rate of 286.9% per cent, and in terms of business traffic, WLAN traffic grew from 40.2 billion MB in 2010 to 200.4 billion MB in 2011, Growth rate of 397.9%.

This fully shows that, after 2011 years of large-scale construction of LAN hotspot, China Mobile WLAN business Development has embarked on a benign development of the fast lane, traffic and income not only to achieve a synchronized growth, and achieve a large stride-type growth. Statistics show that by the end of 2011, China Mobile Base station total more than 920,000, WLAN hotspot access nearly 2.2 million.

But China Mobile obviously will not just meet the current performance, in depth and breadth of two dimensions to further increase the operation of WLAN. At the 2012 meeting earlier this year, China Mobile's president, Li, had made it clear that "China Mobile should pay special attention to WLAN construction and operation in the context of rapid data traffic growth and increased pressure on wireless cellular networks." ”

In WLAN operations, this year, China Mobile has integrated WLAN construction, maintenance, operations and business development into its daily work system. At the same time, according to the plan developed by China Mobile at the beginning of the next three years to build more than 6 million AP, exceed the expected completion of the "Development of 10 categories of applications, to achieve more than 100 cities, the development of more than 10 million effective users" goal, WLAN access capacity will be achieved in February 2012. By then, users will bid farewell to the cumbersome network access authentication operation.

In WLAN construction, in January this year, China Mobile launched 2012 WLAN products centralized procurement work, the scale reached 1.29 million AP equipment. Industry insiders expect, plus the provincial companies in the supplementary bidding, this year, China Mobile's WLAN equipment construction scale is expected to reach 2 million units, and last year's total size of about 1 million units, nearly doubled year-on-year.

LTE into a new power

In the results of this release, China Mobile once again identified the LTE development roadmap. Previously, mobile President Li announced at the World Telecommunication Show in Barcelona that mobile will further expand the pilot scale this year, add three pilot network cities, 9 urban pilot Network will build 20,000 base stations, and plans to 2013 through the new and upgraded two models to make the LTE base station scale of more than 200,000, and expand trial Commercial scale.

According to the plan, China Mobile in 2012 will expand the LTE scale test network construction, in the original six cities on the basis of new Beijing, Tianjin, Qingdao three test cities, the LTE scale test expansion to nine cities. It is reported that China Mobile will build more than 20,000 LTE base stations in nine cities such as Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Xiamen and Qingdao through new and upgraded methods this year.

At the same time, China Mobile will take "new" and "upgrade" two ways to promote the LTE network deployment process. By the successful expansion of the LTE scale test in 2013, China Mobile will make the LTE base station larger than 200,000 by smoothing the new and TD-SCDMA upgrades.

If the scale test network is progressing smoothly this year, China Mobile will promote small-scale LTE trial business in Shenzhen, Hangzhou and other cities, and if all goes well, China Mobile will promote LTE large-scale construction and trial commercial in 2013.

For China Mobile, LTE industrialization, commercialization of speeding up, is undoubtedly the latest and most powerful driving force for overtaking, but from the policy level, LTE photo issuance will have to wait another 2-3 years, the issuance of licences would bring domino effect, the most important thing is that the network spectrum can not be determined, The construction of the base station is difficult to achieve; international handset makers will be very cautious if they do not see clear market opportunities.

Investment will exceed 130 billion this year

Earnings showed that in 2011, China Mobile invested 128.5 billion, accounting for 24.6% of last year's total annual operating income, down from 25.6% in 2010. These investments are used in mobile communication networks, transmission networks, business networks, support networks, civil construction and other network building. In accordance with mobile planning, this year, Mobile will invest 131.9 billion RMB, of which 41% will be the construction of mobile communications network, 26% will be used for transmission network construction.

It is noteworthy that, relative to last year, the investment of China Mobile transmission network will increase 8%, the investment proportion of Bureau housing construction will also increase from 9% last year to 16%, in this respect, an industry personage points out, transmission net and the increase of civil construction investment, means that China Mobile will increase investment in IDC, Broadband Bureau. Among them, IDC will become one of the 2012 investment priorities, will "support the mobile Internet, IoT, cloud computing and other technological innovation and business development."

As early as 2011 years, China Mobile has signed cooperation agreements with Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang and other provinces, and will build the largest, most technologically advanced and lowest energy-consuming data center in Hohhot and Harbin. Next, China Mobile will also be nationwide, the construction of 1-2 public service cloud IDC data Center, and will be the use of storage room.

But for the transmission network investment increases, the industry personage expresses, this mainly is based on the mobile four network coordination strategy demand. Under the new situation, China Mobile wants to build a large-scale complex network, which has higher requirements for the reliability and scalability of the PTN network, at the same time the IP makes the network need high-precision time synchronization function. At present, China Mobile has identified four network positioning, such as GSM mainly carrying voice services and small flow of high-value mobile phone data Services; TD-SCDMA mainly carries mobile data services; WLAN mainly hosts PC mobile phone's Internet Data service While LTE mainly carries high bandwidth and high-quality wireless broadband service.

It is not difficult to find, by continuing to focus on building a LTE-oriented wireless communication network, increase transmission network investment, increase IDC data Center construction, mobile 2012 investment goal is very clear to improve the quality of important users of the service. This includes the provision of quality for individual users, a variety of collaborative network choices, but also to provide users with more powerful, more advanced IDC services.