China News Service quotes sources from the country's major telecom operator as saying that China Unicom will expand average bandwidth from 10 to 20 megabytes per second (MB/s) for urban households in the next three years, with average bandwidth expected to reach 100 MB in certain areas.

The cities of Beijing and Tianjin are among the first to experience this upgrade.

The FTTH (Fiber to the Home) broadband will be used in newly built communities. As for existing communities, FTTB (Fiber to the Building) and FTTH will be applied depending on the specific conditions. Both of these methods have the capacity to provide 20 MB/s broadband.

At the beginning of 2012, the company, one of the country's largest Internet service providers, began speeding up broadband in Beijing for free, with upgrades for 512K to 1M, 1M to 2M and 2M to 10M.

China Unicom's move is part of a national project to provide faster and cheaper Internet service, an initiative from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.