According to reports in Chinese media, China Telecom and China Netcom will roll out IPTV services for somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million households in China by the end of the year. The two companies, along with Alcatel IPTV, have run small-scale trials of IPTV in 10 provinces throughout the country. Alcatel noted that in order for the service to be launched on a wide scale, as anticipated, the existing networks must be upgraded to handle bandwidths between 2 Mbps and 4 Mbps. China Telecom recently inked a marketing deal with Changhong Electronics to set up 1,000 marketing sites across the country to push sales of IPTV-enabled TV sets and China Telecom's IPTV service.
For more on China's IPTV market:
- take a look at this article from IndianTelevision