In 2026, the global 2G and 3G network withdrawal process will officially enter its peak period. Recently, Zhejiang China Unicom officially announced that it will completely withdraw from 3G network services across the province on June 15, 2026. This also marks that the decommissioning of my country's WCDMA network is nearing completion.
WCDMA is the natural evolution of the GSM system, and GSM was once the technology route with the highest coverage of mobile communication users in the world, and its popularity covers most countries and regions.
WCDMA is developed under the leadership of 3GPP and adopts FDD mode. Through subsequent smooth upgrades to HSPA+ technology, the peak downlink rate of the network can reach up to 21Mbps, and some optimized versions can even reach 42Mbps.
Compared with the network speed that was generally measured in Kbps in the 2G era, the experience that WCDMA brings to ordinary users is a milestone step-change, completely breaking the previous limitation of mobile networks that could only send text messages.
It is precisely because of this technical advantage that the WCDMA license China Unicom obtained in January 2009 was extremely valuable in the industry at that time, and was almost a golden ticket in the eyes of everyone.
After obtaining the license, China Unicom built the world's largest 3G WCDMA network in just one year. Afterwards, it made a decision that completely changed the structure of China's communications market. It officially introduced the iPhone to the domestic market for cooperative sales, and once ranked first in the industry in terms of high-end user share.
China Unicom, which relied on the advantages of WCDMA to enjoy a wave of dividends of the times, suddenly began to fail to keep up with the overall pace of the industry in the 4G era. The core root cause behind this was directly related to the license issuance rules at that time.
Entering the 4G era, the global communication technology route has undergone drastic changes. The standards of the entire industry have begun to be unified towards LTE. The entire system is divided into two different standards: FDD-LTE and TD-LTE.
At the end of 2013, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued the first batch of 4G licenses to the three major operators. At this time, less than five years had passed since the official issuance of 3G licenses, leaving a very short window for operators to adjust their layout.
Moreover, out of the core purpose of promoting the development of my country's independent communication standards, the first batch of 4G licenses were issued only for the TD-LTE standard. This was a structural blow to China Unicom, which held a mature WCDMA network, because WCDMA could not be smoothly upgraded to TD-LTE. Instead, China Mobile, which had performed mediocrely in the 3G era, quickly seized a large amount of market share directly by relying on the first-mover advantage of TD-LTE.
It was not until February 2015 that China Unicom finally obtained the FDD-LTE license it had wanted for many years. However, 14 months had passed since China Mobile took the lead on the 4G track, and the other party's 4G base station coverage had already spread to a considerable extent.
Ordinary users actually don’t care about the complicated technical standards disputes behind them. Everyone’s demands are very simple, that is, they want a faster and more stable 4G network. Because of this, a large number of high-end users of China Unicom directly switched to the other two operators, and the trend of user loss was difficult to curb for a while.
After Wang Xiaochu took office at China Unicom, the first major industry-level adjustment he implemented was to clearly propose to stop all scale expansion and new investment in 2G and 3G networks, and to concentrate all the group's limited funds and resources on the construction of 4G networks.
Since the implementation of this decision, the once-famous WCDMA network has gradually faded out of the public eye. 4G has officially become the absolute mainstream narrative in the domestic communications industry, ushering in a new cycle of comprehensive popularization of mobile Internet.
