It’s not a good idea!
It’s not a good idea for people travelling to China for work often. China is going to have their own telecommunication system within the country. This system will bring lots of inconvenience to business travellers. I believe this system will lower the phone cost of local people, as now they have to refill the phone card regularly once they finish the value of it. For what I understand is their phone card doesn’t store too much value to cover much talking time as their phone cost is quite expensive. We pay by monthly fee such as HKD138.00 for 2,000 minutes. Some companies offer HKD60.00 for 1,500 minutes. We have plenty of choices. My supplier did discuss about the telecommunication system in China with me last week. They are surprise that we run monthly payment system for mobile phones, as they have to refill their value card every while, sometimes is less than two days when they talk a lot on mobiles. RMB100.00 is not much to cover, maybe only up to 100 minutes for local phone calls. It’s indeed expensive.
The new system will certainly lower the local mobile phone cost, and brings lots of benefit to local telecom companies. However, it makes very difficult situation for foreigners who travel to China for business, and also make difficulties for local people who travel abroad often. It means people need to have more than one mobile phone for usage as sim card changing system is no more existed. It’s just like network system in Japan and Korea. Most of HK mobiles can work in Japan, Korea and US as most are under network of WCDMA, GPRS and GSM. I guess when China has well developed system for their new network, its about the time HK has upgraded telecom technology to meet their changes otherwise most of HK telecom companies will be in very competitive positions with the Chinese telecom companies.
4 Comments so far
Leave a reply
And I was kinda hoping we were going the other way, making it easier to be global. My current phone finally let me use it in essential the whole world. As in, Europe, Asia(incl. Japan), Africa and the US.
And with China’s EDVDs as well, it will probably grow big and then we’ll have HDDVD, BlueRay *and* EDVD. It’s not really cool… the thought of this futures scenario
But I kinda understand China’s motivations, at least the part with avoiding to pay royalties.
Perhaps I should just ignore these physical media and look forward to streaming of contents…
This new TD-SCDMA system does not replace the existing systems in China; it only adds a new system. Your existing SIM-based GSM phone can still be used in China because I cannot imagine that they will throw away their existing wireless infrastructure (e.g., base-stations) over night. Also, I suspect the adoption of the new system is a ploy to force the existing 3G/4G systems’ license owners (e.g., Qualcomm, Nokia, Ercisson) to lower their royalties.
The wireless carriers in China prefer their customers to use phone cards instead of paying a monthly fee partly because not many Chinese have established a credit history for themselves (e.g., by owning and using credit cards). In the US, only those who cannot prove that they can pay for their services are forced to pay their services in advance with prepaid cards.
I think TT’s suspicion is correct. I very much doubt that China will abandon the existing infrastructure in favor of their new proprietary system. Ironically, China is currently more “connected” than most of Europe. My CDMA phone works fine in China, but will not work anywhere in Europe.
Actually, there is another market for prepaid mobile phones in the US: children, the elderly, and those who use their phones only for emergencies. My parents both have prepaid phones because a monthly plan with lots of minutes would be an expensive waste for them. They pay $100 for 1,000 minutes that are good for a year…and they still have most of their minutes left over at the end of the year.
Thank you for all the clever comments!
Isaack! Nice to see your comment again on my site!