Shanghai Daily reports:

SHANGHAI will have established a citywide wireless broadband network by 2010, probably the first city in the Chinese mainland to do this, the local IT commission and a telecommunication operator said yesterday.

…Shanghai Telecom and the commission signed agreements yesterday for the construction of the wireless network, which will allow anyone to access broadband at anytime from anywhere in the city.

At present, people can access a wireless network in Jiading District in the north of Shanghai. Wireless will probably be available in most areas in the city’s central Huangpu District, where the municipal government buildings are located, by the end of the year, said Hua Ruiqiang, Shanghai Telecom’s senior manager.

…”We have made several proposals for the business model and the technology of the network and it will use mainstream and advanced technology,” Hua said.

Wi-Fi and WiMax (worldwide inter-operability for microwave access) - the evolved version of Wi-Fi with wider coverage and higher speed, will be adopted for Shanghai, according to IT firms like Cisco and Nortel, which say they have been selected to provide equipment for the network.

The network will be funded by the government, Shanghai Telecom and Shanghai Mobile though no decision has been made yet on whether to charge users, according to the IT commission.

Taipei, Philadelphia, and Freetown, Sierra Leone are the only three cities that have deployed a mixed WiFi-WiMAX municipal network, with Taipei’s the biggest.

There have been a number of WiMAX tests and evaluations, but this is on another scale entirely. There’s nothing about the architecture, but I would assume that WiMAX would initially be used to provide backhaul connectivity to a mesh or a group of WiFi access points. Despite all the hoopla over WiMAX, there just aren’t many devices for computers (or phones) to support direct client connectivity. Assuming the project continues, at some blessed state in the future WiMAX-enabled devices should be able to jump on the network at dramatically higher data transmission speeds.

Rolling out the network will be paid for by the Shanghai Municipality, Shanghai Mobile (China Mobile), and Shanghai Telecom (China Telecom). Shanghai’s government is utterly fearless when it comes to large, complex, dubiously profitable, questionably worthwhile, and very high profile technology projects. They love this kind of stuff and it’s a wonder they’ve waited this long to go ahead with it. It’s an interesting side project for China Mobile, the 8 million pound gorilla of China’s telecoms firms. They get a chance to fiddle around with a new technology that’s certain to eventually bleed into their mobile space.

But China Telecom’s only growing business is in fixed-line broadband connectivity for companies and consumers. I’m sure that for them this isn’t a vanity project or an experiment. This is their future, at least until the government figures out how they’re going to restructure the telecoms industry. WiMAX could solve a lot of their problems. Instead of fussing around with last-mile fiber to apartment buildings and office complexes, they just set up a network of base stations and sell or rent CPEs (customer premises equipment). Over time it would save them a lot of money in asset management and could make them a lot of money with relatively simple installations.

It should be noted that this isn’t a mobile WiMAX project. Mobile WiMAX is a slightly different technology and requires different equipment. It will be interesting to see which flavor Shanghai’s network architects choose. The smart move would be to adopt mobile WiMAX (802.16e-2005) to allow for future flexibility. But as the central government has hopelessly botched 3G in China, any move into high bandwidth mobile technology should be approached with caution.

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