China Telecom is ambitious to become the world's largest CDMA service provider by the end of this year, and expand the user base to over 100 million, said Bi Qi, chief engineer of China Telecom Beijing Research Institute.

Bi said on Thursday at the 2010 Mobile Broadband China conference that the voice service was no longer China Telecom's major source of earnings, and the revenue proportion of other services is growing. For instance, the wireless service contributed 17 percent of revenue.

According to Bi, that the largest fixed-line telecom operator will work hard to develop more mobile service subscribers in its fixed-line user base, and pay close attention to the development of high-end users.

China Telecom's CDMA mobile service subscribers topped 71.5 million by the end of May, representing a robust growth from the 28 million users at the beginning of October 2008 when it bought the CDMA business from China Unicom, China's second largest mobile telecom operator.

China Telecom plans to increase the user base to 100 million by the end of this year, and become world's largest CDMA service provider, added Bi.

Since the network signal coverage is key to increasing customer satisfaction, China Telecom still considers base station construction a crucial task for enhancing its market competitiveness.