China Telecom mulling huge EV-DO Rev. B rollout?

You might think that the EV-DO technology path has seen better days, what with carriers like Bell and Telus defecting for HSPA and others prepping to pull the plug altogether -- but really, it might take nothing more than one massive, eight-figure subscriber deployment of a next-gen EV-DO network to get things up and running again. Indeed, EV-DO Rev. B is still very much alive and well, and a rumored deployment by China's number three carrier China Telecom -- which counts over 70 million mobile users to its name -- could definitely light some fires. Telecom has already been running trials of the standard, which can keep pace with the world's HSPA+ networks, using equipment from a number of suppliers; needless to say, we're sure any of them would be happy to fill a huge order regardless of LTE's wider appeal worldwide. Interestingly, Telecom's ultimate plan is still to migrate to LTE -- but considering its rather massive footprint and subscriber count, there's method in the madness of supporting an interim ultra high-speed standard like Rev. B in light of the carrier's CDMA roots. And hey, to be honest, we'll take our 10Mbps downlink speeds any way we can get them.