Song Junde, a professor from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, has disclosed that a WiMax Metropolitan Area Network, the first of its kind in China, will be built in Tianjin's Tanggu Technology Development Zone.

The WiMax MAN will be constructed under a general framework agreement signed between the Ministry of Information Industry and Tianjin Municipality, but the specific details regarding the construction of the network still need to be discussed.

Yu Zhicheng, director of the Communications Information Research Institute of the Ministry of Information Industry, also disclosed that Tianjin's WiMAX experimental network will be started from the Binhai New District and then gradually expanded to the entire city. Yu said that Tianjin's WiMAX is a trial led by the government and it is intended to provide general service to the public.

In recent years, the Chinese government has made efforts in promoting the application and development of broadband wireless access systems. However, one of the biggest problems they face now in developing WiMAX is that there is no frequency allocation due to the government's priority given to TD-SCDMA.