China Mobile HK (CMHK)

Company Overview

China Mobile Hong Kong (中國移動香港有限公司), or CMHK, is the largest mobile network operator servicing Hong Kong. Founded in June 1994 as PEOPLES Telephone Company Limited, the company was acquired by China Mobile in October 2005. CMHK is a wholly owned subsidiary of China Mobile Communications Corporation.

The company provides GSM services over 1800 MHz, and since 2008 3G TD-SCDMA services over B34 (2100 MHz) with HSPA+ data services. Having won 2600 MHz band FDD spectrum in 2009, in February 2012 China Mobile Hong Kong won the SAR’s 2330 to 2360 MHz TDD band to deploy integrated dual FDD and TDD LTE services in partnership with ZTE and Ericsson. After activating an FDD-only B7 (2600 MHz) network in April, CMHK launched the world's first FDD-TDD network in December 2012 using B7 (2600 MHz) and B40 (2300 MHz) bands. Limited deployments of B1 (2100 MHz) are present within HK's MTR rail system.

Through its partnership with Huawei, the network was upgraded to 4.5G LTE-A Pro in November 2016, deploying 2C CA, 4X4 MIMO and 256 QAM, to achieve peak throughput to over 580 Mbps. In August, CMHK became world’s first operator to launch commercial 2.3 GHz TDD 128T128R Massive MIMO technology to improve network capacity and coverage in densely-populated areas.

NB-IoT was commercially demonstrated September 2017 with full deployment underway. It is expected that demonstration and pre-commercial deployment has been implemented over B3 (1800 MHz), however noting CMHK's recommendation of 900 MHz spectrum reassignment to permit a crucial B8 (900 MHz) deployment.

China Mobile HK successfully completed end-to-end 5G testing in August 2018 using n20 (800 MHz) and n257 (28 GHz) bands.