China Next-Generation Information Technology (NGIT) Networks Implementation

Abstract

In March 2011, China released its 12th Five-Year Plan, (FYP, 2011-2015) which contains road maps and goals to guide industries and local government for the implementation of the plan and the outcome will then be evaluated. Willy Shih, professor of Harvard Business School, listed eleven items for the Next Generation Information Technology (NGIT), which is one of the seven Strategic Emerging Industries (SEIs) that government will support in this plan and it is expected these targeted seven priority industries will increase GDP contribution from 2% to 8% by 2016 and 15% by 2020, and will be supported by a budget allocation of RMB 10 trillion (USD. 1.52 trillion) over the five year period. The main NGIT items include: Next-generation mobile communications, Next-generation core Internet equipment, Convergence of Telecom/ Cable TV/ Internet networks, Cloud Computing, etc. From a user point of view: Users today will want information available right away, and don’t care how the digital data is transferred or through which channels. Therefore, we looked at this as one giant system functioning together. The whole system’s functionality, including the policy, is the main reason for attaining the sustainability of the telecom industry’s future growth. The Objective of this paper is to try to examine the sustainability for future China telecom operators’ growth, and the China NGIT future operations will depend on the policies and regulations that government will practice. The sustainability can be categorized under several areas: the new technology including new standards has to be feasible, new services and new content has to be generated, new customers have to be created and most importantly new regulations and policies have to be in place. The sustainability relies also on the social-technical-economic factors; the new policies on these related areas in the 12th FYPs will be discussed. The Actor-Network Theory (ANT) used as an important tool for the case study in this paper it will be used to explain how the China governmental departments worked together to create a new policy or made new decisions in the past? The formation of the 12th FYPs and its main content along with three related cases studies will be discussed. Will these current Chinese ways still be sustainable in the future? Suggestions will be made followed by the Fair Division Problem Solution of the Corporative Game Theory to fit the special competition environment that China had. For example: three Telecom Operators working under the supervision of government and possessing most of the resources of the country for transferring information including: spectrums/ fiber backbones (land & ocean), but the division for the subscribers of these three telecom operators was not equally spread. (By March, 2012. Mobile Subscribers for China Mobile were 667million, China Unicom had 209million, China Telecom had 135million.) The Chinese government’s main concern was security of the information, for example, in China officially there was neither 3 X movies nor violent ones and the content on the web would be blocked if it was deemed inappropriate. The government also seriously monitored the telecom market’s healthy competition environment. Will this be enough for growth?The heuristic analysis and insights in this paper are based on achievable public information and documents such as China Daily, Marbridge Daily, available Web pages and interviews. The interesting trend predicted was that the three telecom operators seemed to be moving towards the Golden Rule from the subscriber number division? China is a developing country, the political system and economic path were all different from others, but still many ways and experiences can be shared and lessons can be learned for other countries. Investor opportunity is huge, but the mind set has to change and a new way of thinking adopted.