When Beijing issued in May last year its 12th Five Year Plan for the telecommunications sector, one of its lofty goals was to plough investments of more than USD323 billion into basic network infrastructure by 2015. A major part of that plan is the commercial roll-out of advanced, high-speed 4G mobile infrastructure, built on the China-developed standard called time-division long-term evolution (TD-LTE), by all three state-owned telecommunications network operators. Technology research firm IHS forecast China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom to deploy a total of 1.05 million 4G base transceiver stations from this year to 2015, a massive undertaking that will increase the operators’ lucrative data traffic in the world’s biggest smartphone market. “The effort is important because mobile revenue accounts for an increasingly larger share of each carrier’s overall revenue,” IHS Analyst Zhao Hailin said in a report. “And revenue could grow even more if more next-generation wireless infrastructure were in place.” The expansion in 4G mobile services will likely help the industry achieve another big target set by the 12th Five Year Plan: more than USD241.9 billion in revenue by 2015. The three operators had combined revenue of USD172.9 billion last year. Of  China’s 1.2 billion total mobile subscribers at the end of August, about 360 million were 3G users “ripe for upgrading to 4G if the infrastructure were available”, Zhao said. China Mobile is making the biggest push this year with a plan to deploy 207,000 4G base stations in both urban and rural areas. China Telecom will install 70,000 base stations and China Unicom 30,000. IHS forecast China Mobile to run the largest 4G mobile infrastructure in China with 477,000 base stations by 2015, which would cement the company’s position as the biggest 4G network operator worldwide. It had 750.42 million subscribers at the end of August. IHS estimated that China Telecom, which had 178.64 million subscribers in August, will have 320,000 4G base stations by 2015, while China Unicom, which counted 269.47 million subscribers in August, will have 250,000 stations. For both China Telecom and China Unicom, FDD-LTE will serve as the primary standard of their 4G networks, with TD-LTE adding supplementary capacity, the South China Morning Post reports.