China Tech News reports:

China Telecom will initiate a new round of bidding in the 21 provinces in southern China to speed up the development of Wi-Fi base stations.

A top manager from Guangdong Telecom, a subsidiary of China Telecom, has confirmed the news and said that they will take big moves on wireless network construction this year. According to the person, Guangzhou Telecom will build a wireless broadband network in many different venues within the city, including hotels, office buildings, schools and cafes.

In the second half of last year, China Telecom conducted relevant prophase equipment tests and preparation and finally decided to design a 802.11g Wi-Fi network. It had already constructed Wi-Fi networks in seven provinces, including Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai, Fujian and Sichuan, on a trial basis last year.

According to the planning of Wang Xiaochu, general manager of China Telecom, China Telecom will speed up the layout of Wi-Fi base stations this year in public hotspot areas so that consumers can use the network. Earlier this month, Shanghai published its timetable for Wi-Fi construction which says that their city will add about 2000 network access sites in all public places and build the city into a wireless zone in two years.

There’s no mention of WiMAX in all this, but the gentleman from Guangzhou Telecom (a subsidiary) implies it when he mentions “wireless broadband”. At least I hope so, for China Telecom’s sake.

I would find it odd if China Telecom were to roll out a pure 802.11g network. The technology is mature, perhaps too mature. Wireless networking vendors are currently wrapping up the standards for 802.11n. It should have a longer range and substantially more bandwidth for video, voice, and data. Apple, never shy to spot a trend or to start one, has already embraced it.

There may be an upgrade path for the base station equipment from 802.11g to 802.11n. However, it will still mean thousands of man hours to upgrade a city-wide network. And that’s assuming the network architects planned the backhaul to support the higher bandwidth that 802.11n offers.

The engineers should have waited until the second half of this year before making the decision.

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