(This news item first appeared on Aug 14 that I missed because I was paying more attention on UTSI than ZTE. But I noticed it today, and find it pretty significant.)

http://iptv.c114.net/236/a434442.html

Reportedly, this award is for 300,000 IPTV lines, to be deployed over 17 cities and counties in the province. It will provide comprehensive Internet TV services including direct cast, video-on-demand, time-shift, and value-add. Huawei, ZTE, and UTStarcom bidded on the contract. Eventually, ZTE won.

It is said that ZTE will provide the most advanced media streaming system, and handset-TV fusion solution based on media streaming.

The article further states that UTSI is the original IPTV platform provider in Anhui. With ZTE's win, there will be a trend of two platforms in parallel development in the province.

To put this news in perspective, I did a little search and find out that according to Interfax report on March '08, UTSI provided IPTV to 3,000 villages in Anhui for party member training. Then on Q1 '08 earnings conference call, Lu stated that the company was working in Anhui with a number of cigarette retailers to add IP surveillance. Anhui also figured as one of the latest IPTV win in the 2008 Analyst Day slides (#58.) I haven't read about UTSI winning any new expansion award in Anhui after that. Perhaps someone can show otherwise.
http://www.interfax.cn/news/tmt/792/
http://seekingalpha.com/article/82898-ut...
http://www.bloobble.com/broadband-presen...

300,000 IPTV lines for a single provincial contract is a pretty large one. It shows the potential of the market in China as well as the growing momentum under way. However, it also shows UTSI does not have much of a technology lead over the main competition anymore and that indigenous competition in China is capable of winning large-size deployment even in markets where UTSI has an early lead. It is evident that after years of extensive trials and deployments, official researches, and side-by-side comparisons of systems from various vendors in places such as Shanghai, China Telecom finds ZTE's IPTV products very competitive to UTSI's. Some Chinese posters commented on the news article that ZTE and Huawei bidded on this contract with prices that are below-cost. But even if ZTE won primarily on low cost, its technology should be good enough for China Telecom to give it this contract given CT's extensive knowledge of the capabilities of products from both ZTE and UTSI.

I'd welcome other comments and differences of opinions, as usual.

tigre