Unicom to invest USD2.2bn to overhaul Shanghai infrastructure

China Unicom is planning to invest CNY14 billion (USD2.15 billion) over the next five years to overhaul its infrastructure in Shanghai, following the signing of an ‘Internet+’ cooperation agreement with the Shanghai Municipal government, Telecom Asia writes. The upgrade will see the operator deploy tri-band carrier aggregation (3C) on its 4G network in the city, with a view to boosting theoretical download speeds from 150Mbps to 500Mbps by the end of 2018 and 1Gbps by 2020. In addition, Unicom aims to provide citywide voice-over-LTE (VoLTE) and voice-over-Wi-Fi (VoWi-Fi) coverage by the end of the year. Unicom will also upgrade and expand its fixed network and plans to upgrade peak speeds to 10Gbps and connect six million homes to its FTTx network by 2018, with that figure rising to seven million by 2020. As part of Shanghai’s smart city project, Unicom plans to install a narrowband internet of things (NBIoT) system consisting of 3,000 base stations by the end of 2017. Finally, Unicom will also build several new data centres and provide cloud computing applications and services to support the smart city project.