Dow Jones Newswires reports that China Mobile’s chairman and chief executive, Wang Jianzhou, today confirmed ZTE, Huawei, Datang and Ericsson as suppliers for its latest TD-SCDMA network deployment. Chairman Wang reportedly declined to provide details of the exact contracts awarded to each vendor, but said that Ericsson got 5 percent of the tender, leaving the majority of the awards to the three domestic vendors. Ericsson said last month it received a SEK175 million (US$21.8 million) share of the contract, which would value the whole deal at SEK3.5 billion (US$423 million). Previous reports have suggested that the new tender is China Mobile’s second phase of its TD-SCDMA 3G deployment, supporting around 12,000 base stations that will see its TD-SCDMA coverage expand to 38 cities in China by the end of June next year.

Commercial 3G licenses are expected to be awarded in China once the country’s mobile industry restructuring is complete. Dow Jones Newswires reported yesterday that this could be as soon as the end of this month. China’s three telecom operators will be granted one 3G license each. China Mobile will likely be granted a nationwide license based on TD-SCDMA technology, China Unicom is expected to deploy WCDMA technology, whilst China Telecom is tipped to deploy CDMA2000 1xEV-DO technology.