BEIJING, Sept. 9 -- China may need to invest 205 billion yuan (US$25.7 billion) to introduce three high-speed wireless standards for mobile phones, Bloomberg News reported.

    The country would need to spend 100 billion yuan to build a network based on its locally developed third-generation standard, 75 billion yuan on another technology and 30 billion yuan to upgrade an existing service, Xie Linzhen, vice chairman at the China Mobile Communications Association, said in an interview yesterday.

    The government hasn't said when it will issue licenses for 3G networks, which allow faster music and movie downloads. Equipment makers such as Qualcomm Inc and Huawei Technologies Co are set to benefit when the licenses are granted, with operators expected to spend 80 billion yuan on networks in the first year, said Beijing-based researcher BDA China Ltd.

    "The demand for voice communication in China is unprecedented in the world," Xie said. In the first seven months of the year, Chinese telephone users made 91.5 million minutes of calls, a rise of 33 percent from a year earlier, according to data from the regulator. China had 431.8 million mobile-phone users as of the end of July.

    The nation plans to build a network based on home-grown time division synchronous code division multiple access, or TD-SCDMA, standard, with capacity for 50 million users, said Xie, formerly vice president of the department of electronics information equipment at the Beijing-based ministry. The association, formed in September 2000, is controlled by Ministry of Information Industry.

    China Mobile Communications Corp, the nation's largest mobile operator, will need to invest 75 billion yuan for a network based on wideband code-division multiple access, or WCDMA, said Xie. If China upgrades its code-division multiple access network, it will cost 30 billion yuan, he said.

    China's government may issue its first high-speed wireless license within six months, in order to be ready to provide the services by the 2008 Olympics, chief executive officer of China Netcom Group Corp (Hong Kong) Ltd said on August 24.

    Chinese regulators in February asked the parent companies of Beijing-based China Netcom and China Telecom Corp, the nation's biggest fixed-line operator, and China Mobile Ltd, the world's largest cellular operator by users, to conduct trials of the TD-SCDMA standard.

    The government in January chose TD-SCDMA as one of its standards. WCDMA was developed by companies including Nokia Oyj and Ericsson AB, and CDMA2000 was created by Qualcomm Inc, the world's second-biggest maker of wireless-phone chips.