China Telecom is to spend US$14.4 billion to buy the mobile company China United. The deal is part of the long-awaited government restructuring of the country's telecom market, announced last week. Full details are expected to be made public later today (Monday).

The South China Morning Post quoted anonymous sources as saying China Telecom wanted China United's CDMA network, Unicom. The company will pay $8.7 billion for the network itself and $5.8 billion for the CDMA customer base.

Unicom has about 44 million subscribers, the paper said. X

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