A China Mobile base station in the Tibet autonomous region. The telecom operator will invest 70 billion yuan in the next three years to expand its rural coverage.

Recently, it is said that in the next three years China Mobile will invest 70 billion yuan to build and upgrade its networks in the country’s vast rural areas and promote the application of its 3G services in the countryside.
According to an agreement the company inked with the Ministry of Agriculture yesterday, China Mobile’s network coverage will blanket at least 98 percent of the country’s more than 5 million natural villages by the time the plan is complete.
Wang Jianzhou, Chairman of China Mobile, said in yesterday’s move “China Mobile’s fulfillment of corporate responsibility as a major State-owned enterprise to narrow the ‘digital divide’ between urban and rural areas”.
In the first quarter China Mobile added 199.1 million new subscribers, 1.23 million lower than that in the same period a year ago.
However, China Mobile has adopted the homegrown TD-SCDMA standard 3G services, which is likely to encounter fierce competition in 3G services from its two rivals as they use more mature standards, analysts said.
Fang Lu, a telecom industry analyst at Shenyin & Wanguo Securities, said “The revenue growth at China Unicom and China Telecom is likely to pick up pace as a result of the 3G rollout”.
China Mobile has 683,000 administrative villages from 2004 spent a total of 19.5 billion yuan in expanding its mobile network coverage. That is 98.98 percent of the nation’s total.