The move is the latest in a competitive battle between China’s major telecom companies to offer the lowest international roaming rates, and it has been excellent for consumers. For example, China Telecom calls from the US, South Korea, Singapore, or Taiwan to mainland Chinese numbers now cost just 0.99 RMB/minute ($0.15/minute). Of course, that’s still quite a bit more expensive than domestic calling rates, it is quite a bit cheaper than most international competitors. A similar international roaming call made with America’s Verizon Wireless, for example, costs $1.99/minute. In other words, China Telecom is more than ten times cheaper.

And the battle may not yet be over. China Mobile dropped its international roaming rates in February in a move to gain a competitive advantage, and Telecom’s latest price drop could trigger a response from either it or China Unicom. Here’s hoping it does; this kind of price war may be hell for the telecoms but it’s awesome for consumers!

(Beijing News via Sina Tech)

The new app, which will be called Yixin, will reportedly be based on China Telecom’s existing chat app Yiliao. The name “Yixin” is itself a little reminiscent of WeChat, borrowing as it does the “xin” from WeChat’s Chinese name Weixin. Sina Tech claims that according to industry insiders and insiders at China Telecom, the company will have a partner in developing and releasing this new app: Netease. Supposedly, China Telecom board chair Wang Xiaochu and Netease CEO Ding Lei have already met in secret to work out a partnership agreement that would see the two companies collaborating on Yixin in the hopes of dethroning Tencent’s mobile messaging giant.

Neither company has yet confirmed the partnership (and a China Telecom spokesman has already denied it), but a Sohu IT report picked up by Chinese state wire service Xinhua features an image of the rumored app in action (pictured above) and provides more detail on the nature of the partnership. According to the article, Netease will help China Telecom add features to and upgrade Yiliao while at the same time integrating its own user account authentication process with the app so that Netease users can log in easily. If the image above is real, it seems that much like other chat apps, Yixin will allow users to share recorded audio, photos, videos, locations, and emoticons with each other in the chat window.

If the rumors do prove true, Netease and China Telecom will certainly have their work cut out for them. WeChat already has more than 300 million users, and most of them are in China. Coming from so far behind, Telecom and Netease are going to have to offer users a very compelling reason to pick Yixin over WeChat, and based on the screenshots above, I just don’t see it. Don’t get me wrong; Yixin looks like a perfectly competent mobile messaging app, but WeChat has the brand, the user numbers, the momentum, and a few cool extras like its business card exchange feature. To enter the game at this stage, China Telecom and Netease would need something pretty revolutionary to take the wind out of WeChat’s sails. I don’t see anything like that in the screenshot above, and neither company has anything approaching the pedigree of Tencent when it comes to chat applications.

Of course, the partnership is still just a rumor, although there seems to be plenty of testimony and even a little photographic evidence that it is real. Since China Telecom has denied the rumor, it seems likely that any product launch is still quite a long time away, if it ever happens at all. A lot could change between whenever the screenshot above was taken and whenever Yixin actually sees the light of day. Perhaps China Telecom and Netease will be able to pull a rabbit out of their hat, but with WeChat at 300 million users and growing fast, it’s going to have to be a pretty damn big rabbit if they hope to stand a chance.

(via Sina Tech, and Sohu IT via Xinhua)

China Mobile reports that it gained 7.05 million new 3G subscribers in January, pushing its total 3G user count to nearly 95 million. China Unicom picked up 3.67 million new 3G subscribers, bringing its total 3G users above 80 million. China Telecom just barely broke the 3 million mark with its new 3G users, which puts its latest 3G user count at just above 72 million.

That’s a lot of numbers, so here’s a chart with the telecoms’ total mobile subscriber numbers included for scale (yellow).

So, while China’s 3G industry is growing fast (keep in mind the red bar in the graph above represents just one month of growth), there’s still a long way to go. China still has fewer than 250 million 3G users, out of a total of well over one billion mobile subscribers.

(Source: Sina Tech, Sina Tech, and Sina Tech; image via China Daily)

China has just reached 233.44 million 3G subscribers across its three mobile telcos. Digging back through the self-reported stats for each, I noticed that the end of 2009 is the earliest firm data point for all companies involved, so let’s take a look at three years of stunning 3G growth in China.

The newest numbers for 2012 Q4 show that China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941) is up to 87.93 million on its 3G network, closely followed by China Unicom (NYSE:CHU; HKG:0762) with 76.46 million, and China Telecom (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728) with 69.05 million. It’s all quite equal (see graph below), and growing at a steady rate.

It’s interesting that the iPhone is not visible as a bump in the charts, but instead it seems to have contributed to the strength of China Unicom (which is actually the country’s smallest mobile telco by overall subscriber numbers) in the long run, allowing it to punch above its weight and closely tail China Mobile in the 3G market.

Or perhaps that’s just down to China Unicom’s very common W-CDMA 3G network, which gives its users access to most of the hottest smartphones out there. In stark contrast, China Mobile’s homegrown TD-SCDMA standard doesn’t support any Apple devices, and relies on handset makers agreeing to make a TD-SCDMA device for the world’s biggest telco. Many big brands like HTC and Motorola have done that; Apple obviously hasn’t.

Many analysts are awaiting 4G hitting China. But that’s very unlikely to happen nationwide this year, as a series of city tests continue apace. 2014 is more likely for that. And so by this time next year, it’s conceivable that there’ll be half a million on 3G. Here’s how it has panned out in the past few years [1] in our chart:

As a virtual telecom operator, private companies issued a license wouldn’t actually be in control of the hardware on the ground; rather they would be leasing the usage rights of it from one of the three state-owned firms. Even so, though, if approved, the regulation could radically change China’s telecommunications market and take a big chunk out of the big three’s market share. Perhaps that’s why China Mobile is already looking into alternative revenue streams, announcing plans to found an internet company and sell a line of branded mobile handsets.

MIIT’s proposed regulation is not yet a done deal; it is currently released in draft form for public comment and is not enforceable. Following the comment period, the Ministry will re-assess the regulation, and potentially even redraft it, before ultimately deciding to enact it or not. That said, regulations that make it into the public comment stage often are ultimately implemented, so there’s a good chance it could really be happening. If it does, look for internet companies (especially Tencent) to be hopping into the virtual telecom game as fast as they’re allowed to. For any company with strength in mobile apps, especially, the possibilites for vertical integration must be quite tantalizing.

(China News Network via Sina Tech, Image source)

None of China’s three mobile telcos have yet set a date for the arrival of the iPhone 5 – though only two of them (China Telecom and China Unicom) are in contention.

China Telecom said last week that it hoped to roll out the phone late November or early December. iPhones and iPads generally hit China long after most other major markets, with a typical delay of three to four months – which is a quarter to a third of the entire product’s life-cycle. Little wonder that so many eager early-adopters are willing to pay premiums from grey-importers who ship in devices (without paying sales tax) from Hong Kong or other countries.

Chinese tech blogs such as Techweb report that China Telecom is preparing one million nano-SIM cards for its own iPhone 5 official launch. The smallest of the three carriers in terms of 3G users, China Telecom has already been handing out free nano-SIM cards to customers who bought grey-import iPhone 5 models from other countries – as have its two other rivals. Clearly the company feels it needs a lot more of those things for its official offerings.

Nano-SIMs are thinner than the micro-SIM cards in earlier iPhone models, so a new card is called for.

Just yesterday we looked at some app analytics that suggested the iPhone 5 already represented 0.1 percent of the smartphones spotted online in China.

China looks set to adopt the worldwide NFC standard for contactless payments, in a move that could be a boost to the usage of smartphones for making cashless transactions in stores nationwide. The development came at a major e-banking summit in Beijing yesterday, where an official at the People’s Bank of China (PBoC) announced that the widely adopted 13.56MHz NFC protocol was the way to go. The PBoC acknowledged that other agencies need to approve this move first, and that it might be rubber-stamped by the end of 2012.

Uptake of NFC has been limited in most countries, held back by a lack of affordable smartphones that have an NFC chip inside, and the many and confusing forms of cashless payments there are out there. This year, a lot of big-selling phones came equipped with NFC – such as the Samsung Galaxy SIII and the HTC One X (though not the iPhone 5) – thereby giving a larger potential user-base. NFC can be used to transfer data at very close range, and can be used to do anything from sending a contact card between two phones to using it to pay for a coffee by just tapping your phone against the special NFC receiver at some stores.

The Chinese payments platform Unionpay, the biggest Maestro-like banking alliance in the country, has been pursuing NFC payments for some time, and claims to have 1.2 million NFC-equipped payment terminals at stores across the country. Next it’ll be a question of getting people to trust it and then use it.

But it leaves the nation’s biggest mobile telco, China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941) in a quandary, as it has been pursuing 2.4GHz RFID-SIM contactless payments since 2009. However, China Mobile was hedging its bets all along, and has been prepping NFC as well with its recently-unveiled “China Mobile Wallet” service which will roll out soon. The nation’s other two telcos, China Unicom and China Telecom, also have an NFC strategy, including selling hardware add-ons for people whose phones don’t have an NFC chip inside.

[Source: Marbridge and China Mobile Labs]

China Mobile doesn't want to walk a lonely road this time around.

China Mobile has had a rough time in China’s 3G era. The company’s TD-SCDMA network has gone nowhere, and allowed competitors China Unicom and China Telecom to catch up as they racked up 3G subscribers China Mobile couldn’t attract. But China Mobile has been developing its proprietary 4G TD-LTE network and by all accounts it is looking fast. It could be a way to put the company way back out in front of its competitors again.

So it might come as a surprise that, according to a leaked memo and an anonymous source cited by Sina Tech, the company does not want to be the only operator of a 4G TD-LTE network in China. Rumor has it the company may be looking to China Telecom as a potential partner who could license its TD-LTE tech for Telecom’s own 4G network.

This might seem foolish because China Mobile pretty clearly has the best tech in the business right now when it comes to 4G. But it seems the company has learned a harsh lesson from its 3G failure, and would apparently prefer to make sure that TD-LTE catches on in China. That’s more likely to happen if there are two major carriers using the TD-LTE standard. And the adoption of TD-LTE as the standard in China would also make it more likely that overseas carriers might adopt the system, since mobile phone manufacturers will definitely be making TD-LTE capable phones if that become’s China’s 4G standard in an effort to capture China’s increasingly giant and lucrative mobile market.

Of course, whether or not China Telecom want to play along with this is another question entirely. China Telecom has made it pretty clear it isn’t that interested in 4G, and it hasn’t even applied to the government for a license to operate a 4G network. But as all three telecoms are state-owned and the market is closely regulated by the government, it’s possible that China Telecom could be (in essence) instructed to adopt TD-LTE for the sake of supporting the international adoption of the Chinese-developed TD-LTE standard instead of the competing FDD-LTE 4G standard. China Mobile’s internal memo makes an indirect reference to this, saying that it hopes telecoms will “share in the responsibility of developing and innovating China’s telecom networks, and become a great driving force for the industry.”

Bearing in mind this is all based on an anonymous source and a single leaked memo, it’s hard to say for now exactly what’s going to happen. But China’s telecom market could be in for a bit of a shake-up as the change to 4G gets closer. China Mobile, it seems, is willing to do almost anything to ensure that this time, its network standard doesn’t get left out.

[Via Sina Tech, Image Source]

Taking cover from Vicente in Hong Kong (Kim Cheng, AP)

As China’s southeast deals with the aftermath of tropical storm/typhoon Vicente, Guangdong Mobile (the local division of China Mobile) has revealed that it sent 30 million warning texts about the storm to subscribers in five cities, in cooperation with the provincial government. Mobile users in Shenzhen, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, and Yunfu received reminders to be careful from the telecom company because those five cities were forecast to be most affected by the storm.

The news comes as Beijing’s government is being asked awkward questions about why it didn’t cooperate with telecom operators to warn mobile users about this past Saturday’s deadly rainstorm, which led to nearly forty deaths in the capital (and allegations that the real death toll might be much higher). As we reported yesterday, Beijing’s Meteorological Bureau claims it would have been impossible to send text message warnings to Beijing’s 20 million residents because its mass texting system is far too slow.

But China’s telecoms say that if the government had authorized them to send warning texts, there would have been no technological issues. All three major telecom providers in Beijing — China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom — have now announced publicly that they would have no technical problems sending warning text messages to their entire networks within a short period of time. However, as China Telecom said yesterday, the companies are not legally permitted to send messages like that without the authorization of the relevant government organs.

The Guangdong government’s successful cooperation with its local telecoms just days after Beijing’s rainpocalypse certainly throws the Beijing government’s failure to do into sharp relief, coming as it does while families are still burying victims of the storm and many Beijing denizens are dealing with severe damage to their homes and property. The rain, of course, was going to cause damage and take lives whether text messages were sent or not. But how many lives might have been saved? How many ruined cars might have been moved to higher ground?

It is painfully clear that Beijing’s failure to warn citizens of the danger by text message has nothing to do with “technical obstacles” and everything to do with a lack of cooperation (and perhaps a lack of interest in communication). This does a great disservice to the people of Beijing, who proved on Saturday that they can communicate and cooperate for the greater good even in the worst of times. Here’s hoping maybe the government will learn the lesson, and next time there’s a dangerous storm coming, they’ll give telecom operators a call.

So this morning I jumped down the rabbit hole of China’s 3G subscriber numbers, and plotted the monthly totals for each of the three major telecoms – China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom – since January of 2011. You can view them in the chart below [1].

[Download image version of chart]

While the numbers are pretty stunning for each, neither company appears to be running away from the others. Although China Mobile is currently the only carrier that doesn’t have an iPhone, so things could change if they strike a deal with Apple.

The figures look even more impressive when the three carriers are combined for a national total of 3G subscribers. Note that the total for 3G subscribers now stands at a whopping 175 million:

[Download image version of chart]

If you look at the monthly subscriber numbers and calculate a month-on-month growth rate [2] then we see that while still pretty impressive currently, it is tapering off a little since 2011. It will be interesting to watch if this changes as newer and more affordable smartphone offerings come to market though. This is not a market that I would expect to stall.

[Download image version of chart]

Specifically, Telecom has added 84 signal stations along lines 1, 2, 5, 8, and 10. The company claims the service even extends through the tunnels on those lines, although the project has just finished installation and is now in the testing phase, so Telecom users shouldn’t expect a flawless 3G signal throughout just yet.

It’s a great step forward for subway time-wasting (and yes, you could use the internet to do actual work too), and it’s something that I hope the other providers will try to copy. It’d be great to have China Unicom 3G in the subways, but of course what everyone’s really waiting for is China Mobile’s 4G TD-LTE. If they get that going down there, I may never come out of the subway.

[CCTime via Sina Tech, Image source]

You won’t be too shocked to see that Shanghai’s internet is the fastest (yes, Shanghai is a city but it’s administrated like a province due to its size, as are several other major Chinese cities), but there are some surprises here. Anhui, one of China’s poorest provinces, apparently enjoys relatively fast internet, and the spread between the best (Shanghai) and the worst (Xinjiang) is a bit wider than you might have expected. Shanghaiers, it seems, enjoy double the connection speeds of net users in far-flung Xinjiang.

ChinaCache also broke some data down by broadband provider focusing on the two biggest national providers, China Telecom and China Unicom:

CORRECTION: The title in the graph below should read “provinces”, not “cities”.

From this, it’s clear Telecom’s fastest connections are faster than Unicom’s — look at those Shanghai numbers — but Telecom also has a wider spread. It’s also interesting to note that China Unicom apparently has faster broadband in Tibet than it does in Beijing. It’s hard to imagine the giant mountains in Tibet make laying broadband cables easier, so we’re not sure exactly why that would be the case.

In any event, it’s definitely interesting to look at this data, which provides the most compelling reason I’ve seen to date to move to Shanghai. (Even so, I’m still never moving to Shanghai). As I previously mentioned, ChinaCache also offers real-time connection speed data on this site, so if you’re curious who’s winning the broadband speed race at any given moment, all you have to do is check.

[ChinaCache via Sina Tech]

In fact, Li says, there will be at least one 4G phone available by the end of this year. Halfway through 2013, there should be at least ten TD-LTE phones available, and in 2014 there will be more than 100, including Apple’s iPhone. There should also be pretty decent service by then, as Li says the company will have 200,000 service bases set up by the beginning of 2013, and presumably hundreds of thousands more by 2014.

However, Li says this plan is still being approved by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). MIIT has been putting the brakes on China Mobile’s 4G plans for a while now, so there’s some reason to fear that MIIT may tell the company to slow down.

Even if the plan is approved, waiting two years for the iPhone probably isn’t what China Mobile customers wanted to hear (the current iPhone isn’t compatible with China Mobile’s 3G network). I suppose 2014 is better than never, but I can’t help feeling like if this is China Mobile’s plan — and MIIT may well slow the company down even further — China Telecom and China Unicom are probably breathing a sigh of relief that regardless of whatever new phone Apple releases, they don’t have to worry about a fast 4G competitor in China until at least 2014.

[Beijing News via Sina Tech]

It appears that the secure ‘https’ version of Google Maps – at Maps.google.com – is now inaccessible, perhaps blocked, in China. But Google’s mapping service works fine in a browser with the non-encrypted ‘http’ in the URL. The Chinese-hosted version of the service at Ditu.google.cn is fine, but its ‘https’ version is borked, loading up the web page but leaving the map area blank.

There are numerous reports of the inaccessibility on both Twitter and Weibo (see below) from across China. But the obscure nature of the ‘https’ block on Maps.google.com has made it not so noticeable as a full block on the URL. People using browsers that tend to revert to the more secure ‘https’ – such as Google’s own Chrome – will find this more of a challenge. Folks who always use ‘http’ and whose browser doesn’t interfere might never notice this new disruption. The secure connection denoted by “https” is important as, to quote Wikipedia, it “provides authentication of the web site and associated web server that one is communicating with, which protects against man-in-the-middle attacks.”

Update (RM): Here’s a quick survey we’re doing among our Chinese readers and friends to find out more about what’s going on. As you can see, many are reporting that with https, maps.google.com cannot be viewed. If you are in China, we’d love it if you could let us know if it’s accessible for you.

Many Google products are interfered with – perhaps by the Great Firewall – in a way that renders them unstable and sometimes inaccessible. Gmail is one; all Google searches often return connection errors as well. Google Maps might be a new victim of this partial throttling, but at least its China-hosted Ditu.google.cn is exempt from this for now. So as long as folks located in China use that web app URL and not its global one, things should work fine.

Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG) maps service has long been under scrutiny in China, and the country’s Bureau of Mapping and Surveying has not yet publicly confirmed that Google Maps has even been issued a permit to operate in China.

Here are some reactions to the inaccessibility on Twitter and Weibo:

@SirSteven In Chrome I can’t not use https — try to do so, it forwards to https and doesn’t load. IE loads http Gmaps fine.

— Matthew Stinson (@stinson) July 5, 2012

@SirSteven @larrysalibra GMaps has been showing up as blocked on Tianjin ISPs for at least 3 days, maybe more.

— Matthew Stinson (@stinson) July 4, 2012

damn, china unicom blocked google maps? children in charge #china

— gregorylent (@gregorylent) July 4, 2012

@SirSteven The bad side here is that many sites seem to use https to embed Gmaps, making for a big empty map window.

— Matthew Stinson (@stinson) July 5, 2012

为什么联通3G卡上不了谷歌地图！ [Why my Unicom 3G card cannot access Google Maps!]

— @Winona疯疯癫癫 on July 2nd

Suggesting that the ‘https’-based errors on maps.google.com have been intermittently going back a few weeks, we also find:

上不了谷歌地图maps.google.com, 必须要通过ditu.google.cn，这样我的一个软件就无法使用了。真是荒唐！[Can not get Google Maps at maps.google.com, must ditu.google.cn, so one of my software will not be able to use it. Ridiculous!]

— @雍同 on June 17th

Image via Wikipedia

China loves islands. In fact, China loves islands so much that it’s involved in disputes over them with a whole bunch of other countries at any given time. One of those disputed island chains is the Paracel Islands, a small island chain that has been administered by China since a 1974 battle in which scores of Chinese and Vietnamese sailors were killed before Vietnamese ships finally withdrew, fleeing Chinese naval reinforcements. China has controlled the islands ever since, but they are still claimed by both Vietnam and the Republic of Taiwan. (The battle was also dramatized in China with the popular 1976 film, Storm in the South Sea).

Aside from scattered military garrisons, it seems the islands are uninhabited, but according to a Shenzhen newspaper, China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom all offer service there. In fact, China Mobile has recently unveiled 3G service on six of the islands in the chain. (The Sina Tech article does make vague reference to civilians living on the island, but the 2012 CIA World Factbook lists the islands as uninhabited aside from Chinese military personnel).

Whoever lives there, the telecom presence is probably quite welcomed, as the islands are tiny and don’t exactly offer all the comforts of home. Woody island, the most developed, features an airport, a post office, a hostel, a bank, and three roads. The others don’t even have that much, but thanks to Chinese telecoms, that’s not going to stop Chinese soldiers stationed there from posting to Weibo anymore.

Of course, the telecom services available on the Paracel islands won’t be much consolation to Vietnam or Taiwan. But realistically, China has a much bigger military than either of them, and the presence of all major telecoms there is proof enough it’s placing increased importance on the islands, which are surrounded by potential oil and gas reserves.

[via Sina Tech]

Chinese casual gaming fans will soon be able to put down their smartphones and instead pick up their remote controls. That’s because Ubitus has just announced that its GameCloud platform will launch in the country in partnership with China Telecom on October 1st, 2012. It’ll bring “cloud gaming” to owners of web-enabled Smart TVs or set-top boxes, allowing them to play console-style high-definition games without the need to actually have a games console. The Ubitus library of licensed titles will bring games covering motor racing, sports, RPGs, virtual fighters, puzzlers, and more, all into the living room on the big-screen.

Games consoles like the Xbox are technically illegal in China, and are only available via the grey-import market. The only real – well, legal – challenger to this new Ubitus and China Telecom tie-up would be the newly-launched, home-grown CT510 ‘eedoo motion’ device.

Chinese brand Skyworth already has plenty of 'smart TV' models.

It gives Taiwan-based Ubitus the first commercial cloud gaming platform that’s running in China. No pricing details have yet been revealed, and this will likely be limited to China Telecom (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728) home broadband subscribers who actually have a fast enough connection speed (after factoring in China Telecom losing more than half of your promised speed somewhere in the tubes) to handle this new wave of cloud gaming.

The deal also saw three major makers of HD smart TVs – China’s Skyworth and Konka, and South Korea’s LG (066570:KS) – brought in to demo the new platform at China Telecom’s own 2012 Tianyi (E-surfing) 3G Handset Fair which took place this weekend in Guangzhou, and where the announcement (pictured top) took place. It’s not clear if they’ll also be demoing the cloud gaming system in-store in the run-up to its October launch.

Just last week we looked at new stats which showed that 30 percent of new, web-enabled smart TVs were being sold in China, making the market second only in terms of enthusiastic adoption to Japan.

Western hacking collective Swagg Security has hacked the network of China Telecom, one of China’s biggest telecom providers and ISPs, and released more than 900 admin logins and passwords on The Pirate Bay, according to the collective. In a public pastebin post made earlier today, the collective writes:

Hacking China Telecom, was as simple as we assumed it would be. As BBC reported, China and Brazil are the most vulnerable to a cyber attack. I assume China neglected the international news source’s article. China Telecom’s SQL server had an extremely low processing capacity, and with us being impatient, after about a month straight of downloading, we stopped. However, a few times we accidentally DDoS’d their SQL server. I guess they thought nothing of it, until we left them a little message signed by SwaggSec. They realized they were hacked, and simply moved their SQL server. No changing of admin passwords, or alerting the media. At any moment, we could have and still could destroy their communication infrastructure leaving millions without communication.

It certainly sounds like Telecom wasn’t exactly prepared for this sort of attack. And the trouble for Telecom may not be over. Swagg Security has shared the logins it acquired publicly via a torrent file, and is encouraging users to log into their severs and screw with them:

In the torrent below, you will find over 900 admin users for China Telecom. The login for this resides at http://www4.chinatelecom.com.cn/sxgz/login.jsp and we encourage you, the people, who China Telecom ignored, to access and tamper with their data. The torrent also contains a more in depth statement about China Telecom, and all their databases and tables.

China Telecom has not yet released an official statement, but we’re guessing that unofficially there is an awful lot of cursing (and, one imagines, some firing) going on in Telecom’s IT department right now. Although it’s probably not much consolation, at least the company isn’t alone; Swagg Sec also hacked the systems of Warner Brothers.

The China Telecom E-Surfing app store on my phone today. Note the two Angry Birds clone games that are featured!

All three of China’s mobile telcos have their own app stores, offering up – and sometimes selling – a mix of mostly Android smartphone and JAVA feature-phone apps. And now the smallest of the three, China Telecom (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728), has revealed some user stats for its Tianyi – or “E-Surfing,” to give it its English moniker – app store and said that it’ll cooperate more deeply with Microsoft on the Windows Phone (WP) mobile OS.

The E-Surfing stats were revealed by China Telecom’s app market head, Dong Tao. He said the the store – at 189store.com – now has 60 million users, 20 million monthly downloads, and a grand total of 100,000 apps covering Android, Samsung Brew, and the older Windows Mobile 6 platforms. But those figures pale in comparison to some of the startup third-party Android app stores in the country. Just last month, one such site, 91 Mobile, said that it saw 900 million downloads (including updates) in the first quarter of this year.

As for buddying-up even more with Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), it’s not clear if that will entail WP7 apps replacing the obsolete WinMo 6 ones in the E-Surfing store, or whether it pertains just to more marketing and support for its sales of the CDMA version of Nokia’s Lumia 800. But WP7 is not so open as the old WinMo 6 in terms of side-loading apps, and so – unless jail-broken – WP users need to use the official Marketplace. And so it’s more likely that China Telecom’s store will aggregate and link to a bunch of apps in the Marketplace in future. In addition, Dong Tao said that his company would engage more with WP app developers and offer up its services to them, such as using the telco’s testing facilities or its cloud platform.

We’ll have to wait and see how that benefits Microsoft’s new mobile OS in China, but it certainly needs more friends in its battle against the dominant Android and the strong iOS.

[Source: Chinabyte - article in Chinese]

Right now across Asia, 63 percent of mobile telcos have rolled out 4G LTE services, or are now conducting trials or have firm plans. That’s the finding of ABI Research in a new paper on the infrastructure for the next-gen mobile data network that will eventually supersede 3G.

Of course, trials and plans do not help consumers stream any movies at blazing web speeds, so the reality is that 4G is fully deployed in very few areas of the Asia-Pacific region – mainly in Japan and South Korea. Indeed, ABI notes:

Out of 110 networks, 10 operators (9 percent) have commercial 4G LTE networks up and running. Another 58 (53 percent) either have specific plans to roll out LTE or are conducting trials.

That’s some way behind the deployment rates among North American and European carriers. Jake Saunders, ABI’s vice president of forecasting, added:

We estimate total Asia-Pacific mobile capital expenditure to reach US$53.3 billion by the end of 2012. 62 percent is still very much earmarked for radio access network deployment. Other key investment areas include EPC and gateway upgrades to the core network at 9 percent, as well as improving in-building wireless coverage into dense urban centers at 5.7 percent.

In Japan, we recently reported that NTT Docomo has two million LTE subscribers; whilst in neighboring South Korea, SK Telecom paid nearly a billion dollars for a key LTE spectrum last year, and is now busy wooing consumers with smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy S II LTE, hoping to lure people away from 3G.

China, meanwhile, has said that 4G can wait another two to three years for an initial roll-out while the nation concentrates on strengthening its 3G infrastructure. China will use the LTE-TDD standard that Apple will reportedly support. Trials are indeed underway, but are limited in scope even within the select half dozen cities where it’s being tested.

We’ve not seen so much action out of India, so thankfully ABI has been keeping its eyes peeled there:

Heavy RAN [LTE-RAN, a different network standard] investment has been taking place in India. A number of operators are jockeying for position in a very competitive marketplace. On April 10, Bharti Airtel became the first operator to launch 4G LTE services in India, in Kolkata. Bharti Airtel hopes to launch 4G services in Bangalore before June 2012. Equipment spend is not just occurring in 4G. The Indian operator, Idea, has continued to roll out 2,270 2G cell sites and 1,176 3G cell sites in the past year.

Singapore will allocate airwaves for 4G next year, says Reuters, but an island-wide rollout is not expected until 2016.

[Source: ABI Research]

Yesterday, China’s internet briefly became an intranet. Most users inside the country couldn’t access any pages hosted abroad, and net users worldwide lost access to Chinese sites. It had been theorized that this was an issue with China Telecom’s internet intfrastructure, or that it was related to the recent earthquake in Southeast Asia. But now both Telecom and Unicom have officially denied that the issues were caused by infrastructure problems on their ends. Both companies say that during the outage there seemed to be nothing technically wrong with their networks, and they aren’t sure what caused the problem.

Unicom officials said the company’s internet reports showed the earthquake had not interfered with underwater cables that help connect China’s internet to the outside world. An expert at Telecom echoed that the problem was not with its network. This is significant because all Chinese internet traffic must be routed through Telecom or Unicom’s network infrastructure to get overseas.

It remains unclear what the cause of the outage was, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has yet to offer an explanation. Personally, I think it’s starting to look like maybe this really was a test of a new government “kill switch” that would allow it to quickly block access to all foreign websites and disrupt the use of VPNs that previously made it possible to circumvent China’s internet censorship system. The fact that some small VPN providers weren’t blocked and continued to operate as usual seems to indicate that bigger VPNs were probably targeted intentionally, since a real infrastructure disconnect between China and the rest of the world would block all VPN traffic, not just traffic from more well-known VPN services.

In light of the recent upheaval in China’s leadership and the upcoming Party congress that will decide who leads the country for the next generation, it makes some sense that the government might be interested in an emergency off button in case something gets out of hand. But it now also knows that if it does block overseas sites wholesale, it will probably have to deal with significant blowback from Chinese net users, many of whom were quite upset about yesterday’s fairly short outage.

[Dongfang Daily via Sina Tech, Image via The Guardian]

As we wrote earlier today, there was something wrong on the internet today. Many people in China (including our own Charlie in Beijing, and Steven down near Shanghai) complained that they couldn’t access websites based outside of China. Strangely, many foreign users were also reporting that they couldn’t access China-based websites.

We still don’t know exactly what happened, but thankfully things came back to normal in the afternoon. Besides the microblog chatter, the blip appears to have gone largely unnoticed in the press so far (WSJ’s Josh Chin blogged about it) – and maybe that’s not so bad, because after all, maybe this wasn’t anything.

Charlie pointed towards a microblog message from a management-level Sohu employee who said that China Telecom was experiencing a problem which cut off access to sites in Hong Kong, Japan, America, Korea, Australia, and Singapore. But China Unicom users were affected by the outage as well. Other users on other providers saw issues too.

There is also the theory that today’s outage might have been the test of a giant internet kill switch, one put forth by many today – some in jest, some in earnest. David Wertime of the excellent Tea Leaf Nation blog wrote about a similar outage that prompted discussion just a week back.

The outage also seemed to affect VPNs, with users in China reporting that most of the big VPN services wouldn’t connect during the outage. Some users with more obscure VPN providers, however, reported no issues with their connections, indicating that popular VPN services might have been a target in and of themselves.

While we can’t conclude too much from today, I am pretty certain that we need to come up with a better way of collecting and organizing outage reports. Herdict.org might be ok if anyone used it, but hardly anyone did today.

In an effort to find out a little more about what was happening today, we polled some of our readers/followers to see if they could help perform a short accessibility test on ten nine [1] Chinese websites. Between the the hours of 12 noon and 4pm (times below are given in Japan standard time, where I am located), we had the following responses, which are presented in a table below. It’s not in any way insightful in helping find out what caused of the problem, but it is somewhat more tangible evidence that there was a indeed a real problem accessing sites from outside China, and from a wide range of countries.

In the process of conducting an evaluation of China’s internet in which the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology found that 98 percent of Chinese sites were up to code in terms of security, the Ministry has also apparently discovered some big problems in the app stores of both China Mobile and China Telecom. Although there are no details yet on exactly what these flaws are, the Ministry’s assistant director of telecom security, Xiong Sihao, did say that some of the issues are “holes” that could potentially be exploited to collect users’ data.

Xiong also expressed displeasure at the seemingly-glacial pace of security development:

Looking at the industry now, there has not been any fundamental change in the [security] weaknesses of the [telecom] operators’ internet environment. Although there have been improvements, there has not been any fundamental change.

This news will probably help amplify calls that the government needs to be more active in mandating that companies meet security standards and protect user data. Personally, I can’t help but wonder, if even China Mobile and Telecom’s official app stores are full of holes, how much worse must some of those third-party app stores be?

[Guangzhou Daily via Sina Tech]

Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) has just wrapped up a launch event for its WP7-powered phones in Beijing. With an emphasis on localized features and Chinese apps and content, Nokia’s CEO Stephen Elop (pictured above) demoed the Lumia 800C and Lumia 600C, which will both launch soon on China Telecom’s CDMA 3G network.

The Lumia 800C, running Microsoft’s WP7 OS, will launch on March 31st and cost 3,599 RMB (US$570), which is a little cheaper than rumors predicted. The budget 610 model will come later “in Q2 2012” with no word on price for the moment. There was no mention at all of an anticipated Lumia 719 handset.

China Telecom's Wang and Nokia's Elop hold up Lumia 800C phones.

China Telecom (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728) was given a lot of air-time as well at the Nokia event, with the telco’s president, Wang Xiaoxhu, taking to the stage at one point, brandishing a Lumia device and shaking hands with Mr Elop (pictured right) at the same time. Mr. Wang later said he’d been using the Lumia 800 for a day-and-a-half and was loving it. The ‘C’ designation at the end of the pair of Nokia phones shown today indicate they’re destined for China Telecom. Presumably, support for the two other mobile telcos in the country will appear in due course.

But the main message from Elop and Nokia was how in-tune the company’s new phones are with local users. There were demos of the company’s apps which, it says, are better suited to China than those found on iOS or Android. These included Nokia Music, Ovi Maps, Nokia Drive, and Microsoft’s Marketplace for WP7. On top of all that, Elop announced a program called ‘Be Top’ to reward Chinese app developers who make quality software for the platform.

Live on stage, Nokia’s Simon Leung said that Microsoft’s app Marketplace for China opens this afternoon, in readiness for the first buyers of the Lumia 800C phone this weekend. And, sure enough, here’s the localized WP7 store. Here’s the Sina Weibo app pictured in it:

A few finer details were mentioned as well, such as how the People Hub (i.e.: the contacts app) in WP7 lists people by the pinyin order – not Chinese character lexical order – of their name; which sounds like a useful and speedy way to find people’s names that’ll make sense to youngsters used to inputting pinyin.

After focusing on the phone, Nokia wheeled out some Chinese social media giants in the form of the CEOs of Sina (NASDAQ:SINA), Sohu (NASDAQ:SOHU), and Renren (NYSE:RENN) to join top execs from Nokia and Microsoft on stage; lots of chit-chat and mutual endorsement ensued. Note that Microsoft’s own event was last Wednesday, where the Redmond company emphasised how there are already 2,000 Chinese-made apps ready for WP7.

[Thanks to PopMobile on Weibo for its images and narrative, and also to Kane Gao (@chassit) on Twitter!]

DeNA (TYO:2432) has been building a range of partnerships in China over the past few months in order to help expand its Mobage China social gaming platform. Today the company’s Chinese subsidiary is announcing perhaps its biggest partners to date, as it has signed deals with all three of China’s major mobile carriers, China Mobile (NYSE:CHL), China Unicom (NYSE:CHU), and China Telecom (NYSE:CHA).

This means that Android users in China will be able to now find Mobage China games in each of the carrier’s official mobile app stores. This is especially important given that Google’s own app store, Google Play, is not supported in China presently. You can check out the screenshots provided by DeNA below.

If you look at China’s three major carriers, they collectively service about a billion subscribers. But as for 3G customers, the most recent figures we’ve seen show that China Mobile leads with 56.59 million, followed by China Unicom and China Telecom with 45.89 million and 41.15 million respectively.

Its activity in China is a big part of the company’s global Mobage push, which also includes a relatively soft rollout of its first iOS games on Mobage Global (or ngmoco’s English-language Mobage). Meanwhile its rival GREE has been busy releasing the first few titles from it’s North American studio, in Zombie Jombie and Alien Family.

China Mobile

China Telecom

China Unicom

We’re only two days away from Nokia’s (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK) desperately needed second-coming in China in which it will launch a couple of Microsoft WP7-powered phones. One news site, WPDang, has it on good authority that the Nokia Lumia 800 will be set at the official price of 3,699 RMB (US$585).

This pertains to the Lumia 800c model which is CDMA, and is therefore heading to China Telecom (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728). And while that would make the phone 700 RMB ($111) cheaper than the telco’s iPhone 4S with a one-year contract (at the cheapest 3G package entry point), it’s worth remembering that the Nokia phone, for all its good looks, doesn’t have anywhere near as impressive a screen (just 800×480 pixels) as on the latest iPhone.

That 3,699 RMB price-point, while cheaper than some thought, makes the phone look pricey up against an Android-powered Samsung Galaxy SII. That device will probably follow in the tracks of the first iteration in being China’s most popular smartphone in terms of sales this year.

Still, at least it’ll be cheaper than the utterly pointless Meego-powered N9 (that sports the same form factor as this Lumia 800), which hit the market at nearly 5,000 RMB last autumn.

Nokia is holding a launch event in Beijing on Wednesday (the 28th), so we’ll soon enough find out what the price will be, and if it has any special Lumia app treats in store for Chinese consumers. Microsoft held its own WP7 launch event last week in which it emphasised that there are already 2,000 Chinese-made app for its mobile OS.

[Source: WPDang - article in Chinese]

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has just wrapped up its own launch event in Beijing for its new mobile operating system, WP7. It marks the official Chinese debut of the software, which will hit the shelves by the end of the month on new devices from Nokia, HTC, and ZTE.

Here are some of the event highlights, along with photos from various sources on Sina Weibo:

The hour-long launch focused on usability and readiness, emphasising that 2,000 Chinese-made apps – out of over 70,000 WP7 titles – have already been made, allowing potential switchers in China to be able to do all the social networking, gaming, and online shopping that they’d expect on a new smartphone:

Among the new apps was one on display from e-commerce site 360Buy (pictured below), and plus there are a number of updates to the early-bird Chinese WP7 apps that we looked at last summer:

WP7-powered phones from Nokia (HEL:NOK1V; NYSE:NOK), HTC (TPE:2498), and ZTE (HKG:0763; SHE:000063) all got a quick live demo:

China Telecom’s (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728) deputy GM, Yang Xiaowei, hit the stage to explain in brief that his company will launch a CDMA version of Nokia’s Lumia 800 next week in conjunction with Nokia itself:

Weird interpretative dance. Apple doesn’t give you stuff like that!

ZTE’s contender will be this, the WP7-powered Mimosa:

HTC’s will be the HTC Triumph, which is a remake of the Titan phone:

Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud service got some stage time, with the focus on its 25GB of storage compared to only 5GB on Apple’s iCloud:

That’s it for now. Nokia is expected to be in action this time next week launching its Lumia WP7 phones in China, probably with China Telecom, and maybe the other two mobile telcos as well.

[Most images from Popmobile’s Weibo page - thanks!]

According to a report by Reuters, China’s total amount of mobile subscribers is about to surpass – or indeed, may have already surpassed – the one billion mark. After a 1.2 percent gain in February, the total figure for the nation’s mobile subscribers was at 999.7 million.

It was expected that the milestone might be passed in February – in fact, we blogged about it a month ago) – but it looks as though we’ll have to put away our balloons and confetti until the official March figures are released [1].

But seriously folks, if you look at the breakdown of subscribers in the chart above, you can see that China Mobile accounts for the biggest share by far, with 661.4 million subscribers in total. But that’s largely due to its ginormous 2G subscriber base. It’s advantage over China Unicom and China Telecom in the 3G space is nowhere near as comfortable.

[Interactive version of chart]

Sina Tech put together a comparison of the plans which might be interesting if you’re actually trying to buy one of these phones in China, but they also are conducting a user poll about what they think of Telecom’s plan offerings and which version of the iPhone 4S they would prefer. The results so far are pretty interesting:

What do you think of China Telecom’s 3G plans?

If you were going to buy an iPhone 4S, which version would you buy?

So Sina’s readers — 23,000+ of them, at least — prefer Telecom to Unicom, but would rather not buy a 3G plan from either of them (in practice, this generally means they’ll use the phone with a China Mobile number and no 3g). That’s interesting, and it appears to be pretty reflective of the general mood, at least on the internet. To verify, we checked out two other polls on Sina Weibo with thousands of voters, and China Telecom was chosen above China Unicom in both of them.

It’s worth noting that the reason for these votes isn’t just the pricing, which actually seems pretty similar between Telecom and Unicom. There is a general perception that China Telecom’s 3G coverage is better than Unicom’s, and that definitely played a role in some of the votes in the Sina Weibo polls.

Of course, China’s iPhone users will ultimately vote with their wallets, so we’ll have to wait and see how the Telecom version sells once it’s actually on the shelves. But if these polls are any indication, China Unicom could be facing some pretty stiff competition.

Rumors of the iPhone 4S coming to China Telecom (HKG:0728) have been swirling for months now, but today the company issued a release confirming it as a March arrival. Specifically, the iPhone 4S will be available beginning on March 9th, and online orders can be placed on March 2nd. According to The Loop citing the China Telecom, the all 4S models (16, 32, and 64GB) will be available starting at 0 RMB on selected contracts.

China Telecom is the third largest carrier in China sitting way behind the dominant China Mobile along with China Unicom. But if you consider just 3G subscriptions — which is a far closer horse race — then it becomes clear that hooking China Telecom is a pretty big deal for Apple.

China has a big appetite for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), particularly for the iPhone, as was evident at the launch of the iPhone 4S back in January, when Apple had to delay its launch due to an unruly crowd outside.

China Mobile dominates in overall subscriptions

...but the 3G landscape is a different story

[Via The Next Web]

As of the end of 2011, here’s how things stand: China Mobile has 51,210,000 3G users, for approximately 40 percent of China’s 3G market. China Unicom has 40,010,000 3G users (31 percent of the market), and China Telecom has 36,290,000 3G users (29 percent of the market). It’s a pretty even spread amongst the three telecoms, who all stand to make money but are also in for fiercer competition as 3G user numbers increase.

All in all, China had 127 million 3G users as of the end of 2011, and the rate of growth in 3G adoption neared 200 percent during that year. 2012 stands to be another big year for 3G growth, especially since the government seems to be ensuring that 4G isn’t allowed to steal any thunder while the 3G market is still developing.

[China Securities via Sina Tech]

I had promised myself I wasn’t going to write about any more iPhone 4S rumors, but this one is so specific it seems like there’s a decent chance it’s true. Chinese tech sites today are reporting that according to knowledgeable insiders, the China Unicom version of the iPhone 4S will go on sale January 6.

Of course, China Telecom will also reportedly be selling the handset, but it’s still not clear when that version will launch.

If the rumors are true, Unicom will be launching the phone nationwide on January 6, which means that people outside of China’s major cities won’t have to wait to get their hands on what we feel certain is going to be a pretty popular phone here despite the fact that maybe it shouldn’t be.

Anyway, if the handset really is to be released so early next month, we should hear an official announcement fairly soon. We’ll keep you updated.

Rumors have been swirling online for a while that China Telecom would be getting a taste of the iPhone 4S action. Now those rumors have been confirmed by China Telecom insiders, but they note that when the company will be able to start selling the phone is unclear.

Telecom sources told Sina Tech that the photos circulating online — like the one here — are indeed actual photos of local China Telecom offices, but that the posters were clearly designed just to “get attention” and don’t indicate Telecom was about to start selling the phone yet, though they will sell it eventually. That sounds about right to us, as the banner above does look a little suspicious. The slogan in Chinese is “Again, everything has changed,” which is an older Apple slogan we haven’t see attached to the 4S in its Western marketing campaings. (Then again, maybe we just missed it, or maybe the China marketing team wants to do some recycling).

There are indications that the 4S is nearing the end of its regulatory journey and will be on the market soon, but how soon is anyone’s guess. Plus, even when the device does hit Chinese stores, there’s a decent chance the Unicom-bundled phones will be available first. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Historically, China Unicom has been the official China partner for Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) product launches, and will almost certainly also be selling the 4S. Telecom’s permission to sell the device will make this the first Apple product in China that two telecoms are officially competing to sell — but of course, there are and will continue to be tons of gray-market and jailbroken iPhones on China Mobile’s network, too.

[Via Sina Tech]

That’s just what Lei Jun did, and so far he’s gotten over 5,000 responses since the message was posted early this AM. But there wasn’t any clear consensus from that, so he decided to put it to a vote more literally, setting up a poll on Xiaomi’s official BBS forum.

As of this writing, over 26,000 people have voted in the poll, but the results still aren’t particularly clear. 38 percent said they supported a CDMA version, 46 percent said that it was unnecessary, and 16 percent said they were “just here buying soy sauce” (Chinese net slang for “no opinion”).

Xiaomi BBS Poll

Effectively, a CDMA version would allow the phone to be used on China Telecom’s (HKG:728, NYSE:CHA) 3G network, which is fast but still the perpetual third-place finisher when it comes to which of the three big telecoms Chinese users choose. We’re not sure whether or not the company is likely to adhere to whatever the final result of the vote may be, but we do think it’s pretty cool that a company would publicly ask for opinions about a tech decision like this, rather than pouring tons of money into a product it turns out nobody wants.

Chinese gaming company The9 (NASDAQ:NCTY) has been pushing its services as an international game distributor this year, first launching its Game Zone service, and then launching an SDK for it this summer. And now The9 says that it has brought 500 licensed games from around the world onto over 30 Android app stores in China – from telco and manufacturer stores to numerous start-up markets.

Regular readers will know that not many Chinese Android users actually stick with Google’s (NASQAQ:GOOG) own Android Market, instead preferring to use local alternatives that offer faster speeds without being tied to a Google account. Recently I reviewed eight such alternative Android app stores in China, and found a healthy ecosystem that supported users here pretty well. But for international game developers, it’s a complex issue and a potential barrier to entry into China (to say nothing of the language divide as well).

The9 reveals today that this game, Tomb of Qin, is its most popular one distributed in China, with 500,000 downloads to date.

That was a strong motivation for The9 in launching its Game Zone. To get a clearer idea of how it has developed to this point in time, Penn-Olson chatted with The9′s Chris Shen, who’s the GM of its mobile business unit.

Prior to launch, The9 realised that Chinese users are not huge fans of the official Market, and so the company looked at “lots of other channels.” Shen continues:

Here, manufacturers provide their own channels, and telcos provide them too. And then there’s HiAPK, GoAPK, Gfans, etc. [...] No one channel dominates here yet. That’s why we felt that to get more coverage for those apps we need to partner with more channels.

Mr Shen reveals that its top two distributed apps in China right now have nearly one million downloads between them. The most popular one is Tomb of Qin – made by China’s Dragon Team Interactive – with 500,000 downloads across all of The9′s outlets in China; the second most popular is Speedx 3D – published by London-based Hyperbees – with 450,000 downloads. It’s a happy coincidence that one is local and one is international – showing the power of getting your app out there to more Chinese casual gamers.

Telco App Stores

In China, all three mobile telcos – China Mobile (HKG:0941), China Unicom (HKG:762), and China Telecom (HKG:0728) – have their own markets and have even implemented carrier billing. Also, some manufacturers have done something similar, such as HTC‘s (TPE:2498) own Market, and Motorola‘s (NYSE:MMI) Shop4Apps; both of those are aimed at developing countries which need a customized solution.

And so The9 aimed squarely at these telco app stores, despite – or because of – their weak app offerings. Shen adds:

We have a very in-depth relationship with China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, and we have a ‘store within a store’ – The9 Store – on those, with all our licensed distributed apps.

With China Mobile, The9 even has an SMS-based promo campaign, to ensure that some major titles get a big marketing push. Here’s the Speedx 3D app page on China Mobile’s MMarket:

The9's most popular foreign game it distributes in China. Speedx 3D has so far had 450,000 downloads in the country.

Security: The Thorn in Android’s Side

Just yesterday I wrote about how some of the Chinese app stores were failing to check apps for malware, exacerbating Android security short-falls that make apps easy to tweak and inject with spyware and repackage. In many ways, The9 tries to be a bulwark against this, serving as a reputable distributor for mobile gamers to look out for. Plus, Shen tells Penn-Olson:

We have a delegate team to track our [distributed] apps across channels in China, so it can find fake or pirated versions of our games, and then begin negotiations to have them removed.

So, that’s how the Game Zone is going so far. It’s marketed as a “one-stop solution” that comprises localization, the packaging of binaries, advertising, and the SDK itself. There’s also OpenFeint integration in most of the international games it distributes here, as a sort of part of the service. That stems from The9′s investment in OpenFeint in March of this year.

In more recent news from the company, The9 announced earlier this week that it’ll open a branch office in South Korea.

Also, here’s The9 Game Zone portal for developers.

via 86callchina.com

Anyone who uses a mobile phone in China is familiar with the phenomenon of spam texts, and the longer you use one number, the more of them will start pouring in. At best, these messages are unwanted ads, and sometimes they’re actually tricks; some messages, for example, will claim to be from your bank in an attempt to trick you into giving away some money.

Chinese telecom providers have always played innocent, saying that there’s nothing they can do about the messages. But it turns out they can stop you from getting spam texts by putting your number on a so-called “red list”. The bad news? You might have to sue them in court to get on the list.

According to a Beijing News story, a few mobile users, like Mr. Yang in Guangdong, just couldn’t take it anymore and sued telecom providers like China Telecom, claiming that the mountain of trashy texts were disrupting their day-to-day life.

In Yang’s case, a lawyer for the company announced that as soon as they had received the court’s subpoena, they put Yang’s account on a “red list” that ensures he won’t get any more spam texts. In a move that’s sure to enrage netizens nationwide, who are already frustrated with the special treatment often granted to government officials here, the lawyer also noted that “almost all of the people on the red list are provincial-level and city-level [government] officials, so you can see from this treatment [we're offering Yang] how sincere we are [about resolving the issue].”

His statement was an attempt to ease the path towards an out-of-court settlement, but it blew up in his face when mobile users caught wind of it and realized that there actually was a way for them to avoid spam texts, and that mobile carriers had been lying about ‘not being able to do anything’ about the problem while secretly fixing it for Party officials and other VIP customers.

Since then, China Telecom and other carriers have been playing dumb, refusing to comment or having spokesmen suggest they’re “not clear on” the details, having just learned about the red list from the news media. But an anonymous “industry insider and expert” in the Beijing News piece is quoted as saying:

In the industry there have always been rumors of this [list], that it’s for Party officials, major public figures and other special users, there are special services for them so that they don’t get spam texts or disrupting phone calls.

The same insider said he or she had never seen proof of the existence of a “red list”, but given that it was announced by one of China Telecom’s lawyers, the cat may now be out of the bag. The good news for telecom providers is that it doesn’t seem to have exploded yet, but this carries all the markings of a public relations ticking time-bomb. A problem that everyone in China experiences (spam texts), a clear “enemy” (lying telecom providers), evidence of special treatment for more ‘important’ people…

…yeah, this could end badly.

[Beijing News via Sina Tech]

China Mobile's M-Zone: a SNS and mobile services store that's bleeding new users.

A new school year in China, a new battle for mobile subscribers amongst China’s three mobile telcos. It’s an annual campus battle, in which the competing companies see a chance to lock-down a customer to one phone number – and one brand – perhaps for life. But China Mobile (HKG:0941), the country’s largest mobile network, is rapidly losing this fight for freshman customers, and that risks its entire market domination.

Compared to its previous amazing success of up to 98 percent market share on China’s campuses, China Mobile is really suffering an unhappy time seeing a decline all over the country – down to as low as 70 percent of new sign-ups amongst university students in many cities this semster.

Early in May this year, a Chinese tech site, ChinaByte.com, published an essay which warned of China Mobile’s slow demise, saying:

Unless it can make a success of its 3G mobile communication services, the world’s biggest telecoms operator enterprise won’t be able to retain its customers even with price reductions.

It painted a picture of the inevitable shrinkage of China Mobile’s business, inspired by a report from ccidcom.com, and of a previously monopolistic company that might be killed by a greater choice of apps and platforms, and by a strengthening China Unicom (HKG:0762), and China Telecom (HKG:0728).

In the past, when everyone was clutching feature phones, and the notion of apps hadn’t caught on, China Mobile’s “M-Zone” was the best and hippest deal in town. M-Zone was the biggest and greatest source of apps and paid mobile services in China, as well as a huge social network. Now it’s just one of many choices – and looking quite rusty and boring.

M-Zone was key to bringing on-board younger users, too. But now many Chinese youngsters have iPhones or Android smartphones, and now they can get games easily from numerous sources. So now the campus market will not be the exclusive domain of China Mobile any longer. This is really a big red flag, which – to mix metaphors – could trigger a butterfly effect of losing new and prosperous (and gadget-loving) 20-something customers way into the future. It’s threatening to China Mobile, in spite of the impressive-sounding performance of an average 80 percent share in the Chinese campus users market.

A China Mobile booth at a university campus, trying to sign up new users. (Image source: china-zhongzhi.com)

From M-Zone to ZZZZZZ-Zone

China Mobile made a smash hit in 2001 when pushing out the M-Zone brand, which it aimed at students. With an SMS package service offering free SMS between China Mobile’s users, M-zone got hundreds of millions of students thumbing their little mobile phones over the years. Also, its VPMN (Virtual Private Mobile Network) service also meets the needs of college students, allowing them to talk for hours on the phone and pay very little money. Sometime later came Fetion,，an instant messenger (IM) software which enable users to send massages from both the PC client and the mobile app – a sort of precursor of the current trend for group messaging apps. These services were really welcomed by younger customers at that time when 3G was not so mature in China, and smartphones and high-end cell phones were not so popular as they are today.

But things change so fast. China Unicom now has its ‘Wo You’ group-messaging app, and China Telecom launched one last week as well. Meanwhile, China Mobile offers free public broadband and WiFi to its own customers in hundreds of cities. Competition is tougher now, and the choices for users are more appealing.

As one of China Mobile’s loyal users for almost nine years, dating from my high school days, I have mixed feelings on this speculation. Though I see more and more friends changing their cellphone numbers to move to other networks, I’m still keeping my M-Zone number – only because of the 3,000 minutes free calling that I get. But now that we all like to download apps from app stores, and engage in mobile gaming and microblogging, I really expect China Mobile to show me something new if they want to keep me – and many other youngsters – as a customer.

[Source: TechWeb - article in Chinese]

China Telecom's new group-messaging app, which will launch next week. (Image source: Sina Tech news)

The upcoming launch of a group-messaging service by China Telecom (NYSE:CHA) next week means that all three Chinese mobile telcos now have free SMS/IM-like apps. It’s a signal that the mobile networks see more profit in getting wealthier users on data plans – either GPRS or, preferably, 3G – rather than clinging on to the old SMS cash-cow.

China Telecom’s free messaging service will reportedly launch next week, with the name Yi Liao (pictured above), which directly translates to ‘wing chat.’ It’s believed it’ll launch with apps for iOS, Android, and Symbian. The service will support free text-, voice-, and even video-messages – so long as users have their GPRS or 3G switched on.

The other two larger mobile telcos are in on the action already. China Mobile (NYSE:CHL) has both its Fei Liao app, and a slightly more basic parallel service for texts only, called Fei Xin (pictured above).

Also, China’s second-largest mobile network, China Unicom (NYSE:CHU), has its fairly new Wo You (also pictured above) service.

In the most recent stats we have for August 2011, China Mobile had 627.6 million subscribers, while China Unicom had 186.1 million. But, only about 15 percent of Unicom’s users are on 3G – despite them carrying the iPhone – while China Mobile has an even lower proportional 3G user-ship of 6 percent.

Elsewhere in the smartphone ecosystem, Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iMessage is now slipping into the hands of global users who have upgraded to iOS 5. Also, some major Chinese web companies have gotten in on the group-messaging fun, such as Tencent’s (HKG:0700) own Weixin app.

[News source for Yi Liao app: Sina Tech news - article in Chinese]

Slashed fiber-optic cables (image via Sina Tech)

Most recently, China Mobile’s new fiber-optic internet cables and nearly 100 other pieces of internet connectivity equipment were violently destroyed at the Zhejiang Industry and Commerce Technical College. Over 150 other cables and additional pieces of equipment to provide connectivity in student dorms were destroyed.

China Telecom has seen similar problems, having fiber optic cables cut at Nanjing Industrial Technical Institute. And China Unicom may have seen the worst of the sabotage, with fiber optic lines and other equipment destroyed at at least five different universities, leaving thousands of students without access to the internet.

It’s not clear who is doing the sabotaging. On the one had, competition over the college markets is fierce and sabotage gives competitors a leg up. On the other hand, all three telecom giants say they’ve been hurt by the destructive interference.

Still, there’s little in the way of motive for anyone other than a telecom operator to cause such targeted and thorough destruction. College students in China aren’t know for pranks the way some of their Western colleagues are, and it’s hard to imagine why students would want to destroy their own internet connections anyway. Similarly, why would anyone who wasn’t associated with the school care about student internet one way or the other? The only ones with real motives to destroy telecom equipment are, sadly, telecom operators themselves. Could the sabotage be being committed by one of China’s lesser-known telecom companies, trying to get into the game by taking out the big competitors? Who knows.

As yet, there’s no real indication of who is behind the sabotage, but we hope police will get to the bottom of it soon for the sake of the students. After all, World of Warcraft isn’t going to play itself!

(I kid — the internet is very important for students, and not just because they like playing games!)

[Sina Tech (Chinese)]

In the past year, China Mobile made 61 billion RMB (about US$9.6 billion) in profits. Yup, that’s not revenue, it’s profits, in half a year. How does that compare to competitors’ financial sheets? Pretty damn favorably. For the first half of 2011, China Mobile’s profits were six times more than China Telecom’s, and twenty-four times more than China Unicom’s. Ouch!

And where are all those profits going? Right into the pockets of the government, as China Mobile is a state-owned and state-operated company.

Of course, all three companies are still making billions in profit, so it’s all relative, especially compared to their beleaguered comrades in the internet industry, most of whom are making only meager profits or still losing money. But this is not good news for other telecom carriers, especially for China Unicom, which stands to lose a good portion of its business if China Mobile really becomes an official iPhone carrier, as rumors have been suggesting may happen this fall when the iPhone 5 is released.

China Unicom is also the only one of the three telecom giants that has seen their profits slide since H2 2010.

[Via Sina Tech]

And now, you can add international roaming rates to the list of things to be jealous of. Following a series of price cuts this spring, all three of China’s mobile carriers offer extremely low roaming rates to customers who have traveled abroad but want to call or text home.

Take, for example, China Mobile (China’s most popular wireless carrier). At their current prices, customers in the US, South Korea, and Singapore can make calls to and receive calls from China for 0.99 RMB/minute, or about $0.16 US. Most European countries and Japan are covered by a plan that allows China Mobile customers to pay 1.99 RMB/minute for calls home ($0.31 US). Calls to the local area are even cheaper; if you’re in the US, you can use your China Mobile phone to make calls to US numbers for as little as 0.59 RMB/minute ($0.09 US).

Texting is even cheaper. Receiving texts is free everywhere, and sending a text home to China from most areas of the US or Europe will cost between 0.19 and 0.99 RMB ($0.03-$0.16 US). Texting and calling countries other than China is also inexpensive for China Mobile customers, if not quite as cheap as calling home.

China Unicom and China Telecom also offer comparable rates. According to this New York Times article, the low prices are possible because these companies can bring such massive customer numbers to bear; nearly 900 million between the three of them.

The deals do vary by local carrier and location, though, and traveling to some of the more obscure locations will cost you. Travel to Uzebekistan or Serbia, for example, and you’ll be paying a pricey 59.99 RMB/minute ($9.30 US) on your China Mobile phone to call your friends in China. But major travel destinations are nearly all covered by the cheaper rates.

[Image source: Digital East Asia]

The Chinese press is pointing to an October launch for an anticipated China Telecom CDMA version of Apple’s upcoming iPhone 5.

This week China Telecom, the nation’s smallest mobile telco, reportedly reworked its subsidies on on-contract mobiles, bringing it more inline with the nationwide flat subsidy that Apple would stipulate. Previously, regional branches of China Telecom could offer wildly differing subsidies on its CDMA 3G handsets.

Other iPhone 5 smoke signals came all the way from Swisscom, where a respresentative claimed that the newest iPhone (expected to have an A5 chip, more memory, and a different frame design with a possibly slightly larger screen) would hit US shelves on September 5th, with a selected global rollout one month later.

Tying those two threads together, the Chinese press is pretty much calling a speedy China Telecom iPhone 5 launch. It would be the quickest ever turnaround from US release to a China launch. The media here are already nicknaming the CDMA variant as version C, and the WCDMA one as version W. The CDMA version already exists on the US telco Verizon.

China Telecom is the only mobile operator in the country whose 3G runs on the CDMA frequency. Currently, China Unicom has an exclusive deal with Apple to sell its global WCDMA iPhone on contract.

China Mobile is the country’s largest mobile telco, with the largest number of 3G subscribers. But being on the home-grown TD-SCDMA frequency seriously hampers its choice of handsets. Once again, it looks likely to miss the iPhone party, and be left picking up the scraps – people who bought a grey-import, unlocked iPhone and just use 2G/GRPS on it.

Earlier this year the number of 3G subscribers in China topped the 50 million mark. China Telecom has the smallest user-base of the three mobile networks here, with close to 14 million 3G users on its CDMA network. Of course, all those numbers are far shy of China’s actual mobile base of 900 million users.

[News Source: Techweb - article in Chinese]

It will be China’s largest acknowledged web-filtering project – an internet content filter that is being built by China Mobile, the country’s biggest mobile telco, in cooperation with the Communist Youth League. The internet whitelist for minors will first run in several pilot areas as early as this October.

The walled garden approach will only allow certain websites to be viewed once the child/minors filter is activated on a computer, phone, or modem – thereby only loading up preordained animation, video and general educational sites that are ostensibly fit for an under-16 audience. The content filter is believed to redirect web traffic via a VPN gateway, that funnels the data along this child-friendly path.

Today’s news comes from state press agency Xinhua, who points out that there will be channels of accountability in this child-oriented web-filtering system: with “accrediting bodies” implementing “content standards” on sites, in a manner similar to film ratings. In addition to websites, it will likely also block traffic to online multi-player games that are very popular with China’s youngsters, such as World of Warcraft.

At the moment it’s not clear if this might extend to China’s biggest home broadband supplier, China Telecom.

[News source: Sina Tech news; Monster image source: Monsterhunter.wikia.com]