Bach Seat

Sean Buckley at FireceTelecom reports that China Telecom is setting its sites on the U.S. market. He is reporting that China Telecom announced plans to expand its global business unit. The move will drive $1.6 billion (CNY 10 billion) of sales in 2013.

Wang Xiaochu, China Telecom’s chairman, said in a China Daily report that the service provider saw the potential for its international business, after developing its China Telecom Global division. They plan to target including Asia-Pacific, Europe, and the Americas.  The article states that the service provider said it will aggressively purchase international assets to expand its presence in the U.S. “It is for sure that China Telecom will conduct M&As globally, and we are training talent to be more well-prepared,” said Wang.

China Telecom Americas

China Telecom Americas (CHA) is the largest international subsidiary of State-run China Telecom. CHA has launched its self-branded retail mobile service in Chicago. Donald Tan, president of CHA said the service will expand to Los Angeles and New York soon. In addition, the Chinese service provider has opened an office in Chicago.

However, one analyst says that given the recent government opposition to Chinese-based companies Huawei and ZTE (783), China Telecom could face similar challenges in serving the U.S. market in a significant way.

“Given the failure of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. and ZTE Corp. in their attempts to gain a foothold in the U.S. market, I am not optimistic that China Telecom, a truly State-owned Chinese company, will do any better,” said Xiang Ligang, a Beijing-based telecommunications expert who also runs the industry information website cctime.com.

China Telecom, the State-owned Chinese service provider owns and operates CHINANET (China’s largest Internet network). This may be why U.S. regulators will try to squash CHA’s growth. My personal experience says that China Telecom does not control its networks very well.

For the last several months, this blog has seen a huge uptick in attacks. The attacks were primarily from China Telecom-controlled IP subnets. So far they have been defended off by the smart use of good software. For the past 10 weeks, there has been a peak of 87 attack attempts and an average of 27 attacks per day from China Telcom-controlled subnets. The attacks originated from the Anhui, Jiangsu, and Shanghai provinces. Over this time the most attacks came from China Telecom’s CHINANET locations ib:

• Anhui province network subnet 60.169.78.x
• Jiangsu province network subnet 61.160.194.x, 61.160.212.x, and 61.160.247.x
• Shanghai province network subnet 61.169.195.x

Akami (AKAM) claims that China is the source of most cyber-attacks in its latest State of the Internet report. The Content Distribution Network (CDN) reports that about 33% of attack traffic originated in China between July and September 2012. Akamai also reports China has been the top source of attack activity since the end of 2011.

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.