China Unicom has announced a wide-ranging alliance with 31 industry partners to support its mobile internet plans.
The operator has partnered with companies including Chinese search engine Baidu, e-commerce company Alibaba and vendor Huawei to build a mobile applications ecosystem for its users, China Dailyreported on Friday.
Unicom has revealed plans to continually add members to the alliance, which will support new mobile internet platform Wo-plus Opening System.
As well as facilitating the delivery of mobile apps to consumers, the Wo-plus system is designed to help developers create and more effectively market their apps.
The operator launched mobile app store Wostore just over a year ago, and by November 2011 the store had around 16,000 apps listed. But this catalog is dwarfed by rival China Mobile's Mobile Market, which has over 100,000 apps available.
Wo is China Unicom's 3G brand.
Another founding member of the alliance is Spanish operator Telefonica. Unicom and Telefonica have been partners since 2009, and recently extended this collaboration to cover access to each others' POPs.
Separately, Unicom rival China Telecom has awarded the contracts for its 2011 comprehensive access network pilot project.
Under the project, the operator plans to deploy a bearer network in six cities capable of carrying CDMA base stations, as well as providing large customer services and soft-switching.
ZTE has revealed it has won more than 50% of the contracts for the project, including for the supply of its IP RAN products.