India attracts investment in 37 handset facilities
India’s ‘Made in India’ push has yielded solid results, with investors setting up 37 handset production units in the country over the past year and creating 40,000 direct jobs, IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said.

Investment has been made by local firms, such as Micromax and Intex, as well as China’s Foxconn, LeEco and others. Annual handset output has nearly doubled to 110 million units.

Ex-minister calls for rapid 4G rollout in Vietnam
Vietnam’s mobile operators need to deploy LTE networks to accelerate the development of the country’s weak broadband infrastructure, said former deputy minister of Information and Communications Le Nam Thang.

Thang, who spoke at a 4G conference, said mobile broadband only covers about 30 per cent of the population and the country can no longer wait for the technology to be deployed, Viet Nam News reported.

The country’s three largest operators — Viettel, Mobifone and VNPT — have been testing 4G but haven’t received licences.

TSMC expected to retain top position
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, is forecast to account for 58 per cent of the global wafer foundry operating market this year, according to IC Insights.

The company’s revenue is expected to increase 8 per cent to $28.57 billion. Despite the growth, its market share is likely to fall one point from last year, the China Post reported.

ZTE talks up phase-1 5G tests
Chinese vendor ZTE said it has completed phase-1 tests of key 5G technologies as part of the country’s government-led 5G tests.

ZTE verified key 5G high- and low-frequency technologies. The results showed that ZTE’s high-frequency prototype performed well in various indoor and outdoor line of sight (LOS) and non-LOS scenarios, with the single-user peak rate reaching the Gb/s level, it said in a statement.

The results also showed that the multi-user shared access (MUSA) technology developed by ZTE allows for grant-free transmission and high overload, which is vital for future high-capacity 5G IoT scenarios.

China’s 5G testing is being guided and planned by the government, with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology taking the led and China’s IMT-2020 (5G) promotion group implementing the plan. The overall testing is divided into two phases: technology R&D tests from 2016 to 2018, and product R&D tests from 2018 to 2020.