CHINA Telecom Corp, the nation's largest fixed-line telephone carrier, denied a report that it's in talks to buy a wireless network from China Unicom Ltd as part of an industry revamp.

"The company has not received any notification about restructuring" or about licenses for starting high-speed wireless services from regulators," Jacky Yung, the company secretary at China Telecom, said yesterday, according to Bloomberg News.

Executives from both companies have been in talks and China Telecom has started to hire people to operate Unicom's mobile-phone network based on code division multiple access, or CDMA, technology, the Nanfang City News said yesterday, citing an unidentified executive at China Telecom. China Telecom has also started talks with suppliers of the CDMA network, the report said.

China's government has said it will reorganize the telecommunications sector in the world's largest mobile-phone market by users, without providing a schedule or details about proposed changes. The nation had 547.3 million wireless customers at the end of 2007, according to government data.