China Mobile, the country's largest mobile carrier, said its 4G subscriber base reached almost 510 million in November. This represents more than 30% of the world’s total 4G subscribers.
Compared to a net increase of 16.6 million 4G users in October, China Mobile added over 12.5 million TD-LTE subscribers only last month, its slowest monthly growth this year.
By comparison, China Unicom added over 5 million 4G customers in November, taking its 4G LTE subscribers base to 99 million. Smallest rival China Telecom added 4.3 million 4G users in November, bringing the total 4G subscriber base to 117.3 million. The operator added 58.84 million 4G customers in the last 11 months.
Together the three Chinese mobile carriers had over 720 million 4G subscribers in November.
In a separate announcement, China Mobile has signed a letter of intent with Vodafone, Ericsson and Lenovo to cooperate on the development of IoT.
China Mobile will connect its IoT connection management platform with Ericsson’s DCP platform and Vodafone’s IoT platform to provide its enterprise customers with a unified global network access, portal experience and Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
This will help drive China Mobile’s overseas market expansion and enhance the company's service capabilities, the operator said.
The partnership with Lenovo will see the Chinese PC maker launch a range of notebooks with built-in 4GLTE modules to offer customers with China Mobile’s high-speed 4G mobile internet services.
China Mobile said there are currently almost 100 million devices connected to the operator’s IoT platform and the number is expected to double to 200 million by the end of 2017.