The Chinese press is pointing to an October launch for an anticipated China Telecom CDMA version of Apple’s upcoming iPhone 5.
This week China Telecom, the nation’s smallest mobile telco, reportedly reworked its subsidies on on-contract mobiles, bringing it more inline with the nationwide flat subsidy that Apple would stipulate. Previously, regional branches of China Telecom could offer wildly differing subsidies on its CDMA 3G handsets.
Other iPhone 5 smoke signals came all the way from Swisscom, where a respresentative claimed that the newest iPhone (expected to have an A5 chip, more memory, and a different frame design with a possibly slightly larger screen) would hit US shelves on September 5th, with a selected global rollout one month later.
Tying those two threads together, the Chinese press is pretty much calling a speedy China Telecom iPhone 5 launch. It would be the quickest ever turnaround from US release to a China launch. The media here are already nicknaming the CDMA variant as version C, and the WCDMA one as version W. The CDMA version already exists on the US telco Verizon.
China Telecom is the only mobile operator in the country whose 3G runs on the CDMA frequency. Currently, China Unicom has an exclusive deal with Apple to sell its global WCDMA iPhone on contract.
China Mobile is the country’s largest mobile telco, with the largest number of 3G subscribers. But being on the home-grown TD-SCDMA frequency seriously hampers its choice of handsets. Once again, it looks likely to miss the iPhone party, and be left picking up the scraps – people who bought a grey-import, unlocked iPhone and just use 2G/GRPS on it.
Earlier this year the number of 3G subscribers in China topped the 50 million mark. China Telecom has the smallest user-base of the three mobile networks here, with close to 14 million 3G users on its CDMA network. Of course, all those numbers are far shy of China’s actual mobile base of 900 million users.
[News Source: Techweb – article in Chinese]
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