On Nov. 25, China Broadcasting Network (CBN) has officially started the bid invitation for its "equipment procurement project for the 5G core network and network cloud resource pool".
It is reported that this procurement covers core network equipment and equipment of the network cloud resource pool for 31 provinces with 5G access in the south and the north regions. The upper limit of the bid price is set at 1.158 billion yuan (tax excluded). It should also be noted that, the project is not divided into several packages, meaning that there will only be 1 winning bidder.
According to the content of bid invitation, unlike the construction model of three major service providers, CBN adopts the large-area model and centralized deployment, to achieve one-stop cloud enabling with a simple structure. CBN’s choice of the single-provider model could be for the consideration of earlier launching and scale commercial application of 5G. However, there is no mention of 2B/2C being deployed in a separate or shared manner in the tender notice.