It's a long story First of all, China Mobile is the earliest G-network operator in China, which China Unicom can't catch up with, and its scale is much smaller than that of China Mobile. In the late 1990s, because of the Sino-US trade negotiations, the United States demanded that China balance its surplus with the United States, or it might take some economic measures. At this time, the Ministry of Commerce proposed to purchase American CDMA technology. Of course, China Mobile doesn't want CDMA, and the G network is enough for it to earn, so Unicom is the only choice. Of course, some people in the Ministry of Commerce advised China Unicom to pretend to do it, and there is no need to do it. However, China Unicom foolishly wants to take advantage of CDMA 2.5G over GSM 2G to compete with China Mobile. So I went crazy into CDMA and spent nearly 1000 billion. However, due to the high patent fee of CDMA, the price of CDMA mobile phone remains high. The promotion of CDMA has been unsatisfactory, and basically only the investment is not profitable. After several years of persistence, 3G came out. As one of the three 3G standards, CDMA2000 has adopted fewer operators, and the 4G standard has come out, so CDMA2000 is doomed to be unable to continue to evolve. At this time, the company controlling CDMA patents, headed by Qualcomm in the United States, also knew that it was no longer possible to treat CDMA2000 as a treasure and sell it at a high price. Therefore, the terminal of CDMA2000 began to reduce the price, but it was badly done by Unicom, and there was really no intention to continue to operate CDMA2000. It aims at WCDMA, the highest standard of 3G, and thinks that WCDMA will still be competitive even in the 4G era. It happened that the country reorganized the operators and formed three major operator systems. Unicom and China Netcom merged, and China Mobile and China Railcom merged, both of which have fixed-line business, but the fixed-line boss has no mobile phone business and network, so Unicom, which has two networks, is going to sell one network to telecom. At this time, China Unicom is simply welcome, CDMA is completely unnecessary, and it is logical to hand over more than 40 billion yuan to telecommunications, and telecommunications has nothing. Besides, something ready-made is better than nothing.
At this time, because the patent fee of CDMA/CDMA2000 has been greatly reduced (4G has been popularized abroad, and no one will want 3G technology unless it is sold cheaply), it is still popular.
As a result, the 3G era has become a situation of mobile TD-SCDMA, China Unicom WCDMA and telecom CDMA2000.