[ET Net News Agency, 29 August 2018] Jefferies Research cited a newswire report saying
that the MIIT may have made a 5G spectrum decision to give each of China Telecom (00728)
and China Unicom (00762) 100MHz at 3.5GHz.
For China Mobile (00941), it will receive 200MHz at 4.9MHz but also be given 40MHz at
2.6GHz to combine it with its 4G allocation of 60MHz at that level to do 5G.
The research house sees that as a continuation of major asymmetric regulation to support
Telecom/Unicom, and maintain a 3-player market.
Jefferies said 4.9GHz is way too expensive to deploy, so it believes Mobile bargained
for the permission to use 2.6GHz, which it already is using for 4G.
Jefferies cited its industry contacts suggesting that the MIIT may ask Telecom and
Unicom to return those 40MHz of spectrum to reallocate to Mobile, so that CM can have
contiguous 100MHz of spectrum at 2.6GHz. That may sound good, because the ideal spectrum
size for 5G is a minimum of 100MHz of contiguous spectrum.
However, Mobile has likely fully deployed the 60MHz for 4G service, and thus it will be
hard to free up those 60MHz to create 100MHz of contiguous spectrum for 5G. It is possible
for Mobile to gradually move 4G users to one side of that spectrum, and ask for MIIT
permission to use the 55MHz unallocated portion of 2500-2555MHz.
However, that will still mean Mobile will have inferior data speed to that of
Telecom/Unicom (each having clean 100MHz contiguous spectrum) for a few years. (KL)