MIIT Addresses Need for More Telecoms Infrastructure

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) and the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council (SASAC) announced they are increasing efforts to improve China’s public broadband infrastructure. They eye this as a key step in bringing economic benefit to smaller regions and to spurring additional economic growth.

MIIT has plans to achieve this through four different channels, including increasing investment in telecoms infrastructure and building a high-speed network, discovering new ways to lower broadband costs and make it universal, encouraging broadband application innovation and increasing the speed of policy development to ensure healthy industry development. From an infrastructure standpoint, MIIT is looking to expand 4G networks, increase fiber optic availability, deploying SDNs to use pre-existing infrastructure more efficiently and improving the mobile broadband access experience. One main motivation for infrastructure building is to help the poor midwest regions have access to internet and to promote the 'last mile' strategy for broadband access. This will help alleviate poverty in these western regions. 5G R&D is in its second phase of testing and projects in Hangzhou, Fuzhou and Guiyang are underway to improve the backbone network architecture. These projects are set to be completed by the end of 2017.