APAC Policy Perspectives Series 2: China
China : Public Policies and Regulation, Legal and regulatory framework on FTTH/Fiber Networks
Legal and regulatory framework
China published a series of documents from ministry level, province level and city level, which create stable and favourable environment for the network installation of operators and provide good experience for subscribers. These documents give regulations from network installation, protection, infrastructure sharing, facilitating public infrastructure resources and so on.
Deployment Targets
By the end of 2021, FTTH networks and 4G mobile networks have accessed to all the administrative countries in China. Particularly, over 94% of the China population have connected to Internet through FTTH networks of no less than 100Mbps by the end of June 2023. The Ministry of Industry and Information technology (MIIT) of China published “The 14th Five-Year Plan for the information and Communication Industry” in 2021, and the goals are mainly focused on the installation of 5G mobile networks and improvement of access network as follows:
By the end of 2025, the goal for the percentage of administrative country accessed by 5G networks is 80%, and the goal for the number of ports of no less that 10G-PON is 12 million.
Funding and incentives
Evaluate to what extent the governments provide funding and incentives to encourage the deployment of FTTH networks, particularly in underserved or rural areas. These incentives could include tax credits, grants, low-interest loans, or other financial support to network operators.
At the beginning of 2015, there are approximately 50,000 administrative countries haven’t accessed with FTTH, and 150,000 with FTTH network lowers than 4Mbps. To promote the coverage of FTTH network to these countries, China started the “Telecommunications universal service compensation mechanism”. The central revenue provide financial support to operators that are responsible for the installation of FTTH networks in the under served administrative countries. By the end of 2020, over 22 billion Yuan have been used in the mechanism and help to access FTTH networks to all the administrative countries. From 2021, the central revenue plans to provide over 10 billion Yuan funding to the mechanism to further improve the FTTH networks in administrative countries and increase the coverage of 5G networks
APAC Policy Perspectives China Part 2 is coming next month.
Stay tuned !
