"Billions wasted in China's telecom"

via Wikipedia A rather interesting piece on the official news agency Xinhua, quoting auditor-general Liu Jiayi reporting on Wednesday to the fourth session of the Standing Committee of the 11th National People's Congress.

He said the telecom sector had experienced huge growth in both network scale and capacity since the industry's reform and restructuring that started in 2002; repeated investment had dragged down performance.
According to the National Audit Office (NAO), more than 1.12 trillion yuan (about 164 billion U.S. dollars) was spent on the construction of basic facilities between 2002 and 2006. However, only one-third of the telecom cables were used.

His fierce criticism comes at an interesting moment, as the country is preparing for yet another reform of the telecom industry and three domestic competitors are fighting to become market leader.
All three, China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom/Netcom will continue to spend even more in the years to come:

But some experts warned repeated investment was not less likely to happen as statistics showed the restructured China Mobile and China Telecom would each spend between 50 billion yuan to 60 billion yuan in infrastructure building in the next three years.
In answer to such a problem, some experts suggested the country should separate the network and infrastructure building and as sign it to an independent organization, while telecom services would be open for competition.

It is a sound suggestion, but might be coming too late as the new spending spree has already begun.

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