China has overtaken Europe by building hundreds of thousands of masts to carry superfast 4G mobile signals and western executives are warning that the country will pull further ahead with plans to more than double construction this year.

While the take-up of 4G services in China lags behind the rollout of base stations – given services only became commercially available last month – the scale of the infrastructure building underlines the country’s ambitions for the future.

China Mobile became the country’s first 4G operator in December last year and it built about 200,000 base stations before the launch. This is already more than are deployed across all of Europe, according to analysts at HSBC and CCS Insight. China Mobile’s network covers as many as 500m people across the major cities on the country’s east coast.