The General Office of the National Development and Reform Commission ("NDRC") and the General Office of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ("MIIT") have recently distributed the Circular on Organizing and Initiating 2019 Construction Projects for New Generation Information Infrastructure (the "Circular").
The Circular states that, targeting middle and western regions and northeast regions in China, network infrastructure improvement projects will be launched in small- and medium-sized cities. These projects are intended for building, with each province as the unit, new premises metropolitan area networks (MAN) and IP MAN node equipment and also expanding the capacity of existing ones, within relevant counties and towns, building optical cables, telecommunication poles/pipelines and optical transmission devices and also expanding the capacity of existing ones, between counties and towns and between cities and counties, in a bid to lay foundations for increasing the end user access speed and the popularity of broadband connections in rural areas. The Circular provides an array of indicators, including "launching such improvement projects in at least 20 counties in each province or municipality directly under the Central Government". Moreover, the Circular sets out requirements for project applications, clearly stating that project applications may be filed, with each province or each centrally-administered enterprise as the unit, and proposed eligible projects for which good development foundations have been laid will be cherry-picked, and adding that project applicants shall be enterprise legal persons. Construction projects must be applied for by enterprises having the operating permit for telecommunications business.