China Unicom has the least motivation to deploy LTE and 4G due to the ‘reliable’ state of its current network, the report says. The carrier holds a bandwidth advantage over its competitors due to its W-CDMA network and future HSPA+ could provide download bandwidth speeds of up to 40MBps and upload speeds of up to 11MBps.
The carrier is also the country’s sole retailer of Apple’s iPhone, and can expect to reap significant ARPU rewards resulting from the device.
“Today, there is no strong need for LTE networks. LTE devices are extremely limited in availability and 3G and 3.5G networks are capable of supporting most mobile applications,” says Wang.