China Mobile has achieved a 4G LTE customer base on 200 million, the telecom operator announced at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2015 in Shanghai.

In May, China Mobile said it achieved 222 million 3G subscribers and 170 million 4G subscribers. The 200 million 4G subscriber base indicates that China Mobile 3G subscriber base is still ahead of its 4G user base.

China Mobile, the world’s largest telecom operator based on mobile subscribers, said that its number of base stations reached 940,000.

The telecom operator grew its 4G subscriber base thanks to the availability of nearly 1,000 4G smartphone models. Apple is one of the main suppliers of 4G smartphones.

The operating revenue of China Mobile in 2014 rose 1.78 percent to RMB 641.4 billion. China Mobile’s voice services revenue fell 13.1 percent to RMB 309.0 billion. Due to the OTT impact, voice usage decreased 0.5 percent to 4.29 trillion minutes. The voice services revenue accounted for 53.1 percent of the revenue from telecommunications services.

The state government-owned China Mobile said its data services revenue in 2014 grew 22.3 percent to RMB 253.1 billion. Data revenue accounts for 43.5 percent of the revenue from telecommunications services against 35 percent in 2013.

The revenue from wireless data traffic rose 42.2 percent to RMB 153.9 billion. The mobile data traffic increased 115.1 percent to 1.1329 trillion megabytes.

Since the company started developing 4G LTE network on TD-LTE technologies, it has sold more than 10 million 4G mobile phones. China Mobile has sold nearly 100 million 4G smartphones this year alone.

China Mobile claims that its 4G ARPU is 1.5 times of its average users. 4G data usage is 3.8 times of the average users.

China Mobile executive vice president Li Huidi said that the company’s 4G network and smartphones are assisting the company to significantly increase the flow of traffic and the company’s income.

During the first six months of this year, the telecom operator’s Web browsing business among its 200 million 4G users increased by 2.6 times year-on-year, video services rose by 4.6 times and instant messaging business jumped 2.8 times.

Meanwhile, China Mobile is using the MWC 2015 Shanghai to release its NovoNet 2020 Strategy. China Mobile will combine all the latest technologies such as Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networks (SDN).

Baburajan K
[email protected]