China Telecom offers 10 times faster broadband in Shanghai in 2018

Shanghai will become the first city in the world with full coverage of one-gigabyte broadband bandwidth in 2018, more than 10 times faster compared with the current network now, China Telecom said today in Shanghai.

With greatly improved speed of broadband services, users can have services like super high-definition video services, IPTV or Internet protocol TV and other interactive services, said China Telecom, which has attracted more than 5.2 million family broadband users since kicking off the service in Shanghai 20 years ago.

The local average broadband bandwidth is about 71.7 Mbps or megabytes per second — already the fastest in the Chinese mainland. By the end of 2017, the average broadband bandwidth in Shanghai will reach 115 Mbps, 12 percent growth year-on-year. The 1-gigabyte broadband network will be 10 times faster, which will cover the whole city by 2018, said China Telecom.

Enterprises and organizations are also expected to benefit for the upgraded network, covering on the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence applications.

Smaller carriers including China Telecom and China Unicom have to develop unique advantages to compete with market leader China Mobile, analysts said.

Last week, China Unicom announced to attract 78 billion yuan (US$11.5 billion) investment from companies including Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.