China Mobile, which has achieved 6.5 million LTE subscribers from 300 cities in the last six months, said its 4G ARPU contributes three times as other users.
Earlier, China Mobile said its ARPU decreased to RMB 62 in Q1 2014 from RMB 68 in Q4 2013. The decrease in ARPU was primarily due to OTT players.
China Mobile added 33.35 million 3G customers to reach 224.98 million in Q1 2014. 4G subscriber base of China Mobile reached 2.79 million in Q1 2014.
Despite adding 3G and 4G subscribers, China Mobile posted drop in wireless data traffic to 566.8 billion MB in Q1 2014 from 660.8 billion MB in Q4 2013.
China Mobile Chief Executive Officer Li Yue said 4G customers currently account for less than 1 percent of the total subscribers. They contribute 10 percent of total mobile data traffic
Li Yue said the world’s largest telecom operator has set up over 320,000 TD-LTE base stations.
For comparison, Indian 4G operator Bharti Airtel, according to an official statement, achieved 100,000 LTE 4G users till 31 December 2013. In the recent past, Airtel tried to expand LTE user base by adding voice to its data offerings on Apple and LG smartphones. Airtel does not share 4G specific base station data.
China Mobile aims to promote the development of LTE-Advanced and hopes that new technologies with higher efficiency can be applied to the LTE network.
China Mobile has sold more than 12 million TD-LTE smartphones and the company aims to sell 100 million 4G devices by the end of this year.
“We hope to introduce over 300 models of TD-LTE terminals this year, and our major focus is to bring $100-$150 4G smartphones that support 5-mode and 10-band or 5-mode and 12-band to our customers,” said Li Yue.
5-mode global roaming-enabled 4G terminals priced under $100 are expected to hit the market at the end of this year.
Relevant terminal technologies will be further evolved focusing on VoLTE, Rich Communication Suit (RCS) and multicarrier-based terminal system with broader bandwidth and faster data rates.
