Beijing may be China’s capital, but as we saw last month, it’s still not winning any races when it comes to internet speed. But the Beijing subsidiary of China Unicom may help to change that today, as it launches a new broadband connection scheme that ups speeds and makes 4 Mbp the slowest connection in the city. Given that Beijing’s average broadband speed right now is 3.5 Mbps, that’s pretty good.

So, if you have a Unicom broadband connection, here’s what’s changing for you, starting today:

• If you had a 512 kbps or 1 Mbps connection, then your connection speed is being raised to 4 Mbps.
• If you had a 2 Mbps connection, your connection speed is being raised to 10 Mbps.
• If you had a 4 or 8 Mbps connection, your speed is being raised to 20 Mbps.
• Fiber-optic customers may be able to get speeds of up to 100 Mbps.

In short, it’s good news all around, with everybody’s internet getting faster while prices stay the same (at least for now).

The move is in part a response to China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s goal of having 75 percent of Chinese broadband users on 4 Mbps or higher connections this year (up from its 50 percent goal for 2012). Given that seems likely that Unicom may roll out similar plans in other cities across China, so even if you don’t live in Beijing, you can hold out some hope that someday soon, your internet speed will get kicked up a notch too.

(Tencent Tech via Techweb)

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)

To be clear, the company has not, as yet, announced any sort of separate fee structure for these services, and the new tracking features could simply be a way of letting users see in more detail where their data usage is coming from. In the screenshot above (which comes to us via TechWeb), none of the OTT apps listed is using much data, but for some users, such a tracking feature might help them to realize that WeChat is eating up most of their monthly bandwidth.

Given the ongoing brouhaha over how much these apps are costing China’s telecoms as people move away from texting and into mobile chat apps, though, it’s hard not to see this separate tracking as a possible precursor to some kind of separate fee structure. Research firm Ovum estimated that in 2011, worldwide telecoms lost about $14 billion in texting feeds to mobile chat apps, and that picture hasn’t been getting any prettier, especially in China where WeChat has exploded over the last year. If telecoms like China Unicom were looking to charge WeChat users and get some of that lost text message money back, separately tracking data used by OTT apps might be the first step.

For now, Unicom’s new OTT app data traffic tracking is basically just a helpful feature, albeit one that users who wanted it could already get from plenty of third-party apps. But it could turn into something a bit more sinister. We’ll have to wait and see.

(via TechWeb)

According to Telecommunications Industry Net, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) recently held a closed meeting to discuss telecom operator subsidies to help the companies cope with the cost of Over-The-Top (OTT) services like Tencent’s WeChat. China Mobile and China Unicom reportedly both sent representatives to the meeting, but apparently were unable to agree on a path forward.

The dispute apparently centers around China Unicom’s concern that large subsidies would provide a greater benefit to China Mobile, increasing that company’s competitive advantage. With its relatively smaller network, China Unicom is less affected by the massive bandwidth WeChat users eat up, and apparently that’s enough reason for Unicom to be opposed to high subsidies.

In the long term, it remains to be seen how China’s regulators and telecom industry will handle WeChat’s growing user base and the bandwidth it eats up. In fairness to Tencent, WeChat is also probably driving some customers to upgrade to 3G wireless subscriptions so that they can do voice and video chat from anywhere, but even so, telecom operators will need to find a way to deal with the way that OTT services like WeChat leach customers away from their own more profitable telephone and SMS messaging services.

(Telecommunications Industry Net via Sina Tech, image source)

Mobile users of China Unicom’s data networks, the company has some news for you: now you can check your own browsing history as stored on the company’s database. Unicom subscribers anywhere will be able to call the company’s customer service line and check their own history including sites visited, time spent online, and bandwidth used for any browsing session over the past three months. Users in select provinces will also be able to check this data via an official iPhone app. Of course, if you’re checking over the phone you’ll need to confirm your identity with your state ID number.

On the one hand I suppose this is a useful service, but it’s also a creepy reminder that ISPs — and not just Chinese ISPs — are tracking every website you visit and hanging on to those records. Moreover, Unicom’s new database checking mechanism makes identity theft an even scarier proposition: now whoever knows your state ID number also has access to everything you’ve done online with your phone over the past three months. I don’t even want to imagine the horrible things that could be used for.

Unfortunately, China has a pretty vibrant black market online that trafficks in stolen personal data like names and state ID numbers, which would be all you’d need to check Unicom’s new browsing history database. And the fact that the database will now be available through phone systems and an iPhone app might also make it easier for hackers to crack into directly.

In any event, there’s not much you can do about it. Other mobile providers are certainly already tracking browsing data as well, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them roll out similar services in the future. Consider this news a reminder that, wherever you are, you really ought to get a VPN.

(via Sina Tech)

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)

As you can see, the company picked up just 3.8 million new users in November. That sounds impressive, but it’s China Mobile’s worst monthly performance since 2005. Of course, it’s still not bad by any stretch of the imagination — it’s actually still higher than China Unicom’s total new users in November — but it isn’t the kind of strong growth the company has been used to, and its new 3G user signups are still a little behind Unicom.

So, while November wasn’t a disaster for China Mobile, the company is probably hoping very much that it isn’t a trend, either. New user signups have already been nearly halved since this year’s high (5.96 million new users in February), and if they drop much lower, there really will be a big gap between China Mobile and its more 3G-friendly competitors.

[via Sina Tech]

In news that should surprise precisely no one, China’s 3G market continues to grow like hotcakes. Or, rather, grow like a weed. The market is growing like a weed and 3G plans are selling like hotcakes. Whatever, people, you get the point: 3G in China is growing fast.

For the lastest in the mountain of evidence supporting that assertion, here are some numbers from China Unicom’s November: 3.25 million new 3G subscribers, bringing the company’s total 3G subscriber number up to more than 73 million. The company also picked up 78,000 new 2G clients, bringing that total up to 162 million. The company also picked up 44,000 new broadband accounts and, unsurprisingly, lost more than 170,000 wired phone accounts over the course of the month.

With 4G still showing no signs of becoming commercially available anytime soon in China, 3G continues its rapid growth. Case in point: China Unicom added another 3.2 million 3G subscribers in October, brining its total 3G number up to more than 70 million. Readers may recall that Unicom picked up 3 million new subscribers back in August, too, indicating that this pace is apparently sustainable. (That’s good, because Unicom has quite a ways to go before it catches up with China Mobile).

China Unicom’s broadband business is growing, too. In October, the company added 677,000 new broadband accounts, brining its total up to more than 63 million.

Mobile 2G growth, unsurprisingly, is much slower. Unicom added just 190,000 new 2G accounts in October, and that number is down by more than a hundred thousand compared to August, which indicates the company’s already-slow 2G growth is slowing even further.

Of course, Unicom also offers wired phone services, but interest in that is clearly waning. The company lost 25,000 wired phone subscribers in October.

[Via Sina Tech, Image Source]

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]

Unicom also picked up some new 2G users in August, but with just 336,000 new accounts, it’s clear that new 3G subscribers are growing much faster than new 2G subscribers. 3G still has a long way to go, though; China Unicom has more than 162 million 2G-only subscribers. This number is part of the reason China’s government is delaying the release of a 4G network; it wants to see 3G networks more widely adopted first.

Unicom also offers internet service; and unsurprisingly dial-up connections dropped in August by 167,000 accounts, while broadband accounts jumped 647,000. Here too, though, there is still a ways to go. In total Unicom still has more than 92 million dial-up users and just 62 million broadband users.

[Via Sina Tech, Image Source]

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]

Moreover, 2G may not be quite as dead as everyone has been predicting; the company also picked up 380,000 new 2G subscribers in June. Not too shabby, that. In the release of June data last night, Unicom also noted that it had picked up 860,000 new broadband customers and 60,000 new dial-up accounts. Count that among the growing pile of evidence that China’s wired internet users are growing quickly, too, even if more Chinese users access the net via mobiles these days.

As 3G grows in China, China Mobile’s unpopular TD-SCDMA 3G network causes that company to lose ground to competitors Unicom and Telecom. China Mobile, however, is out in front with its 4G TD-LTE network, and could well dominate that market whenever it is finally allowed to make it commercially available.

[Securities Daily via Sina Tech]

ZTE has stated publicly that the numbers are a result of China’s big telecom operators (Specifically China Mobile and China Unicom) delaying invitations for cooperative bids and the closing of some deals until the second half of the fiscal year, meaning that the profits ZTE generated from similar deals last year didn’t make it into this year’s first half numbers.

Others have speculated there’s more to it than that, and predict layoffs within the year, although there doesn’t seem to be much to substantiate the layoff rumors just yet. It’s worth remembering, too, that ZTE is very international and was thus impacted more significantly by international financial troubles like the European financial crisis than most other Chinese tech firms.

But if ZTE is telling the truth about its flagging profits that also indicates a problem in a way: the firm is clearly heavily reliant on contracts with China’s major telecoms. As domestic smartphone makers increase exponentially, many of them with more appealing brands than ZTE, the company could find itself less appealing to big telecoms and boxed out of the contracts that clearly make up a big percentage of its current revenue stream.

The company recently announced a 4G smartphone, and is apparently banking on getting in on the ground floor as TD-LTE increases in popularity and (hopefully soon) becomes available to Chinese users.

[Sina Tech]

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 practice, though, it appears that the “up to” in “up to 42 Mbps” is very important. Despite excellent signal reception in my apartment in Beijing, my Unicom 3G service has never been very fast. In light of this speed update, I decided to try a speed test to see what effect the new 3G network has had on my connection speeds. Gaze ye upon my results, and despair:

Yes, it appears that while 3G users in Beijing theoretically can experience speeds of up to 42 Mbps — perhaps in the same way one theoretically can win the lottery while getting struck by lightning — I would be lucky to hit 2 Mbps. It’s not an anomaly either (I ran this a couple times, and tried it out on my wife’s phone as well); China Unicom’s 3G is just slow. Even though it’s apparently now ridiculously fast.

I called China Unicom to get some clarification on this, but the rep I spoke to appeared to be about as confused as I was. At one point, she told me that the fastest speed I was likely to see via 3G in Beijing was 500 Kbps — that’s really slow — and finally said there was no real way to be sure about speeds as it depends on the network of the area you’re in and, to a lesser extent, also the phone itself.

I guess the moral of the story here is that China Unicom’s speed pronouncements are pretty much meaningless. If you were hoping to actually experience blazing fast 42 Mbps downloads on your phone, don’t hold your breath.

[Metropolis Bulletin 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

At the same time, Unicom also announced some other numbers. The platform now has cooperation agreements in place with more than 200 publishers, and offers more than 150,000 books. The company also shared that over the entirety of 2011, Wo Reader got a total of 4 billion hits. That’s a huge number, but given China’s population and the size of China Unicom, I’m honestly not sure whether we should be impressed or not. Put it this way, though: it’s definitely not a bad number. It’s also not clear whether that number includes mobile hits or just refers to the website, and whether it’s straight-up hits or unique visits.

[via Sina Tech]

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]

A report from Bloomberg this evening cites China Unicom (HKG:762) as saying that it expects its 3G revenue to surpass that of its 2G subscriber revenue for the first time this year.

As of the end of April (see table below) the company’s 3G subscriber total sat at 51.8 million, which is still just behind China Mobile which has 61.9 million. China Telecom, the third major carrier, has 45.6 million. The gap between China Unicom and China Mobile is continuing to shrink, and the difference between them stands at just over 10 million subscribers.

China Unicom rolled out higher-speed HSPA+ 3G to its customers earlier in the month, available to any 3G customers whose phone or tablet could support it. The company had long enjoyed being the sole carrier of Apple’s iPhone, until China Telecom recently started carrying it as well. China Mobile is still in talks with Apple about possible cooperative efforts.

As a whole, China now officially has over one billion mobile phone users, a milestone the country surpassed in the first quarter of this year.

4 Mbps bills for 2 Mbps service

Guo lives in Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, and his internet service is provided by China Unicom, so he called the company’s customer service hotline. He was told to wait for a repairman to come check it out, but no one was available for nearly a month. Eventually, it turned out that from his repeated calls, Guo had multiple bug reports in Unicom’s customer service system, but that no one bothered to deal with any of them.

Eventually, Unicom did send two repairmen, who told Guo the issue was that the wiring in Chifeng was old and that there was no way for him to reach speeds of 4 Mbps. If he wasn’t satisfied, they told him, they would be happy to remove his broadband connection entirely. They also tested his connection speed using a device they had brought themselves and pronounced it to be around twice as fast as Guo says he has experienced in his own tests.

Woeful customer service aside, Guo’s case raises a question I’ve seen elsewhere on the Chinese internet: why are companies advertising broadband speeds in places where they can’t provide them? Does this constitute a kind of false advertising? At my own apartment here in Beijing, I pay for 4 Mbps service. A test on speedtest.net just now gave me a speed of just about 3 Mbps for both download and upload, and in the past I’ve seen it as low as 2 Mbps. Obviously it would be difficult for the broadband company to provide a connection that is constantly exactly 4 Mbps. But if my connection isn’t capable of reaching 4 Mbps at all — I’ve never seen it that high — isn’t it false advertising to suggest that what I’m buying is a 4 Mbps connection?

Of course, this isn’t just a problem in China. The gentlemen from Penny Arcade suggested a solution to this problem all the way back in 2009:

Something tells me my broadband provider here in Beijing would have a problem if I paid them less than the price that’s posted on their flyers. Still, though, it would only be fair. Perhaps China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology should consider regulating the way broadband providers are allowed to advertise speeds. Or, testing connection speeds in the homes of random consumers to make sure they’re living up to their promises.

[Zheng Dongfang Wang via Sina Tech]

In good news for lots of iPhone, iPad, and Android users, China Unicom (NYSE:CHU; HKG:0762) – the country’s second-largest mobile telco – will be rolling out higher-speed HSPA+ 3G next week. The roll-out will occur on May 17th to anyone with a phone or tablet that can support that kind of speedier 3G.

Unicom’s regular WCDMA 3G network can hit 7.2Mbps – but with HSPA+ soon reaching mobile devices, more folks can get (theoretical) speeds of up to 21Mbps. The May 17th date is somewhat significant, as it’s a full year after China Unicom launched its HSPA+ coverage in 56 cities across the nation. But previously it had been available only to customers who bought a Unicom network card for attaching to laptops.

In a message sent to 3G subscribers (pictured below on my phone), China Unicom informed its customers:

Dear users: from May 17th, 2012, onwards, China Unicom’s 3G network will be faster. If you have a phone that supports HSPA+, you’ll be able to use the network when you’re in a HSPA+ supported area. Note that when the network is quicker, please pay attention to your data usage.

China Unicom currently has 48.86 million 3G subscribers in recent stats, trailing behind – but catching up with – the giant China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941).

HSPA+ is a contentious issue of late, mainly due to weasely American telcos trying to equate the term with 4G, which, in technical terms, it is not. HSPA+, according to the digital Delphi (Wikipedia), “enhances the widely used WCDMA based 3G networks with higher speeds for the end user that are comparable to the newer [4G] LTE networks.”

China Unicom was in the news back in September of last year when an executive spilled the beans on the not-yet-released new iPhone, saying that it would support HSPA+. That turned out to be true. On AT&T, users with the new iPhone 4S later saw their 3G icon turn into a ‘4G’ one once they updated to iOS 5.1. I wonder if that’ll happen for Unicom subscribers as well.

As for 4G, it is currently under testing in some major Chinese cities, as we reported earlier today.

The company has also grown substantially, now boasting over 1,000 employees, including more than 400 people on its service team. Xiaomi was criticized by some for having substandard after-sales service after its handset was released, and clearly the company is working hard to ensure that if nothing else, the service team is not understaffed. It is apparently dealing with an average of 150 customer problems per day at present.

In addition to building and training its young customer service team — most of the service staff has been at the company only a few months — Xiaomi is working on its next generation handset and building and optimizing various internal apps, like its Miliao chat platform.

It’s worth noting that Xiaomi is not a public company and isn’t required to publicly disclose any of this information; it was all surrendered voluntarily as part of an “Open Day” promotional event. That’s pretty cool; we like numbers and openness, so we hope other companies may follow Xiaomi’s lead here. Cough, cough, eedoo, cough.

[via Sina Tech]

New 3G subscriber stats for China’s two largest mobile carriers show that China Unicom (NYSE:CHU; HKG:0762) is still making good progress, hitting a new milestone in its pursuit of China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941), the world’s biggest telco by user numbers. For the first time ever, China Unicom’s number of 3G users is now well past 80 percent of China Mobile’s 3G subscriber base [1], and is closing in at a rate that suggests that the smaller rival might surpass China Mobile in terms of 3G by 2013 Q1.

New stats for the end of March (2012 Q1) show that China Unicom’s 3G (WDCMA) smartphone subs amounted to 48.86 million, out of 160.63 million total GSM mobile users. China Mobile, meanwhile, rocked up to 59.56 million on 3G (TD-SCMA) from a whopping 667.2 million on its entire network. Historically, China Mobile has been hobbled by its localized TD-SCDMA data network, which doesn’t work with most global phones or tablets. China Unicom, in contrast, can be used with any global WCDMA phone, such as the popular models like the Samsung Galaxy S and SII and is the first to get Apple’s iPhone and iPad in China (with it coming later to China Telecom (NYSE:CHA; HKG:0728) for its CDMA network).

In total, China has just over a billion mobile users by now.

Here’s an interactive graph showing the 3G user-ship of Unicom relative to China Mobile; note the fast-shrinking proportional gap between the two rivals:

[Download image version of chart]

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.

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

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]

China Unicom (NYSE:CHU; HKG:0762), the country’s first partner with Apple for the iPhone, has said that it has negotiated with the Cupertino company to allow users to download and update apps larger that 50MB over its 3G network. In contrast, iPhone users in other parts of the world will have to connect to wifi – or go via the iTunes desktop app – in order to snag larger apps on their iPhones or iPads.

The announcement came from China Unicom via its official customer service Weibo page [1], and it concluded by saying (in my rough translation):

… After getting feedback from Apple, this [50MB limit for 3G] issue is resolved, and our Chinese account holders can now download apps [over 3G] with no file size limit. If you still have a problem, please restart your iPhone and try it again.

Sina Tech then tested this, and was indeed able to install a 103MB game – MetalStorm: Wingman – over China Unicom’s 3G network with no warning pop-up or restriction met. But the website also reported that not all users are happy with this development, with some folks saying that it’s just a trap to make people go over their monthly data limit and then get hit with surcharges.

Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) recently lifted its 3G app download limit from 20MB to the current 50, after the high-res screen on the brand-new iPad meant that even some very basic apps would be in excess of 20MB in file size. Indeed, this could prove a problem for China Unicom users. If you have, say, just a 500MB per month data plan, then updating even one small app [2] will take you well over your theoretical daily average data level. Too much of such app downloading and updating, and your data plan could be busted well before the end of the month.

We’ll have to wait and see if this back-fires for China Unicom with bad publicity from potential instances of 3G data overuse.

[Source: Sina Tech news - article in Chinese]

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.

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]

China Mobile wants their 4G TD-LTE network out soon to capitalize when the next iPhone is released.

China’s biggest telecom provider, China Mobile (NYSE:CHL), has been facing a challenge from China Unicom (NYSE:CHU) as demand for 3G services in the country expands, mostly since China Unicom is the only official partner for the iPhone (although millions of iPhone owners jailbreak their phones and use them on China Mobile).

So it’s not hard to understand why the folks at China Mobile have been so gung-ho about 4G TD-LTE network technology. Last year, the company ran successful tests of TD-LTE in seven cities around China, and had planned more widespread testing and perhaps even a commercial launch for this year. But according to Taiwan’s Digitimes, its plans have been stymied by government supervisory authorities, who have thus far declined to grant the relevant permits.

This is especially bad news as China Mobile hopes they can be the first network to support the next iPhone model, which many have speculated will support a 4G network of some kind. China Mobile even spoke with Apple and supposedly received a “positive answer” when they asked about a 4G LTE handset.

Without permits, China Mobile’s 4G TD-LTE network is essentially in purgatory. Some have speculated that the government wants to allow 3G networks — which aren’t yet widely used in China — to grow in popularity before pushing another new mobile networking tech on consumers who might get confused.

Whatever the reasons, China Mobile’s 4G TD-LTE network is going nowhere without those permits, so if you were holding your breath waiting, we suggest you stop. You could be in for a bit of a wait.

[Digitimes via Sina Tech]

via LIU JIN/AFP/Getty Images

As ‘things’ on the internet get bigger, so too have broadband speeds increased to keep up with them. These days, when multiple people in a household might be engaged in high-bandwidth activities like watching videos all at the same time, a fast connection is a necessity. For some people in China, though, it’s also an impossibility.

Although China’s major internet providers — telecom giants like China Unicom (HKG:762) — have been steadily increasing their available speed, smaller local broadband providers haven’t been following. And with major telcoms’s recent and free upgrade to 10M connections, some local users are starting to get pretty annoyed that not only is their internet slower, they don’t even have a choice in providers.

That’s because some local broadband companies have made arrangements with residential communities that give them a complete monopoly over ISP services to residents of the community. “Some real estate developers have totally shut us out,” a spokesman for Guangdong Telecom told the Guangzhou Daily. Basically, in some new communities developers hold open bidding for exclusive rights to be the tenants internet provider, and whoever lays down the most cash gets the job, no questions asked. Guangzhou Daily reporters spoke to representatives of one such community, who told them that major telecoms were welcome to apply to enter the community, but that they’d have to come to an agreement with the developers, the owner, and the local broadband company that owns the monopoly on the development before they were allowed in.

This kind of monopoly means that these local companies have no real reason to be interested in increasing the quality of their services, meaning that some users are stuck using connections that were perhaps fast years ago but now seem agonizingly slow because they just can’t stand up to the demands of the modern internet user.

It’s a complex issue, and one that doesn’t appear to be immediately solvable. But as demand for fast internet continue to rise, providers are going to have to up their speeds or face mobs of angry customers with pitchforks — or something like that, anyway.

[Guangzhou Daily via Sina Tech]

China Unicom (NYSE:CHU; HKG:0762), the country’s second-largest mobile telco, is finally ready to sell the iPhone 4S – next Friday, the 13th – and has revealed its contract plans. Chinese consumers who sign a two-year contract can get a free iPhone 4S 16GB model if they pay up for a minimum of 386 RMB (US$61) per month of 3G data, SMS, and calls.

The cheapest monthly plan is for a mere 66 RMB ($10) per month, but that necessitates a much higher deposit for every model. It’s pretty much the same contract system as for previous iPhone models that China Unicom has carried. But with Chinese consumers being used to the less restrictive method of buying an unlocked phone (if it’s a grey-import, then it comes with no sales tax) and then running it on their preferred mobile network (even if that means using 2G), there’s not too much in Unicom’s data packages to make the contract an alluring choice for most people.

Bloomberg Businessweek notes (read it here) that the ‘free’ 4S deal (for 16 and 32GB models, but not the 64-gig one) starts at just 286 RMB per month so long as a three-year user contract is signed. [UPDATED 1/6, 1:30pm BST - Added info for 3-year contracts].

China Unicom currently has 36.5 million 3G subscribers and remains Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) sole official partner in the country.

Readers in Asia might like to note that Apple’s online store is currently running a one-day sales promo for Chinese new year in some countries, although discounts are fairly small – no more than 8 percent off, it seems) – and don’t include any iPhone models. Here’s Apple’s Singapore online store.

Plus, here’s a useful table of one- and two-year contract plans for the iPhone in China that was posted on QQ Tech and which are easy to figure out even if you can’t read Chinese:

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.

Yuri Milner, image via Great Wall Club

We already knew Xiaomi had scored $90 million RMB in new financing — they announced that at their press conference with China Unicom on Tuesday — but Lei Jun has now revealed on Weibo where at least some of that money came from: DST founder Yuri Milner.

DST is an investment company, and its name draws a fair amount of attention because it has made some very smart bets in tech companies over the years, including Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, Spotify, and 360Buy. There are also rumors the company continues to flirt with Sina Weibo, although given the regulatory changes going into effect there that might be less of a sure thing. In any event, the Xiaomi investment was made personally by Mr. Milner, not by DST.

In other Xiaomi news, we’ve received some clarifications from the company in response to our questions about their cooperation with China Unicom. According to a Xiaomi rep, the China Unicom phones are the same as the phones Xiaomi sells on their site, the only differences being the addition of Unicom’s “Wo” branding and pre-installed content (and, of course, the 700 RMB markup). Xiaomi also told us the phones were available in Unicom stores in major cities starting Tuesday afternoon. However, I was in a Unicom shop in Beijing on Wednesday and saw no signs of Xiaomi’s handset, nor any kind of advertisement for the phone, so it’s still not as easy to get a hold of a Xiaomi as you might hope.

Still, the immediate availability of millions of Xiaomi phones via China Unicom probably does explain how the company managed to run out of the things so quickly on its own website.

At a press conference today in Beijing, Xiaomi’s CEO Lei Jun confirmed rumors that the company will cooperate with China Unicom to offer a custom-made Xiaomi handset through the telecom giant. Previously, Xiaomi’s M1 was available only via Xiaomi’s website, and has only rarely been in stock.

The phone will go for 2699 RMB ($421) through China Unicom stores, but will be cheaper if purchased with any of several different two- and three-year service package plans. China Unicom has ordered at least a million units, and perhaps more — the company didn’t provide a specific number at today’s press conference. The phone will be available at over 4,000 brick-and-mortar locations, as well as via Xiaomi’s official site.

Mysteriously, it seems they didn’t share the two most important pieces of information about this new phone (we didn’t attend the presser but were watching the official Sina Weibo liveblog): how the Unicom phone differs from the M1 Xiaomi offered for 1999 RMB on its site (if it is different), and when the thing will actually be available. That seems like pretty basic information, but this was a press conference in the style of Apple, i.e., it’s a lecture and no one gets to ask questions. We’ve contacted Xiaomi for clarification and will update you when we hear back.

In the meantime, a few other bits of Xiaomi news:

New Financing

Sina Tech reported this morning that Xiaomi has also recently received a new round of financing, and at this afternoon’s press conference, Xiaomi announced it was $90 million, which puts the company’s overall valuation at $1 billion.

Does the M1 cost 900 RMB to make?

A recent report on DoNews suggested that after disassembling a Xiaomi M1 phone and examining the parts, the whole thing costs about 900 RMB in parts. Although obviously Xiaomi also invests money in development and actually manufacturing the things, CEO Lei Jun responded, saying it was just a rumor and adding: “these false experts shouldn’t be talking nonsense.”

China Unicom (NYSE:CHU; HKG:0762), the country’s second-largest mobile telco, has revealed its user statistics up to the end of November 2011. Despite being Apple’s official partner for the iPhone in China, it’s still quite far behind the number of 3G users that the semi state-owned China Mobile (NYSE:CHL; HKG:0941) has.

In the past month, China Unicom added 3.35 million 3G mobile subscribers to its tally, and 21.4 million new 2G/GPRS users. It now has 36.53 million making use of its WCDMA 3G network, and a total of 159.902 on 2G.

In contrast, China Mobile has, up to Q3 2011, 43.16 million smartphone-toters on 3G. (Newer figures will not be available for another month). China as a whole now has over 100 million on 3G.

Looking at the interactive graph below, we see some solid growth at China Unicom in the past 15 months – a time in which it increased its 3G user-ship by 284 percent from a mere 9.5 million.

The company’s next milestone will be – finally – getting the iPhone 4S officially onto its network, though that has been a tale of patience and false hope.

the Xiaomi M1

Finally, some news about a phone that isn’t the iPhone 4S! For the past few days, rumors have been swirling about a cooperation between China Unicom (NYSE:CHU; HKG:0762) and Xiaomi, and the latest reports have it that Unicom has ordered two million of Xiaomi’s M1 phones.

That’s quite a coup — and a change — for Xiaomi, which had previously suggested that its phones would be available exclusively via the company’s official online store. We assume Unicom isn’t buying two million of the things for personal use, though, so expect to see them in stores after all — if the rumors are true.

We’ve reached out to Xiaomi for comment on this story, and will update it if we hear back.

As of now, the Xiaomi’s phones are only being shipped to customers who preordered them early this fall. But starting December 18 — i.e. this Sunday — the phones will be available for purchase to everyone via the company’s website. If Unicom actually has ordered two million Xiaomi phones, it’s not yet clear when those phones will appear on store shelves.

[via Sina Tech]

Now, everyone seems to be reporting that the 4S has received its network permit after all, but the model number they’re citing — A1431 — is the same model number that net users previously pointed out is Apple’s model number for the 8 GB iPhone 4. So, yeah. If you’re confused yet, that makes two of us.

Anyway, Tencent Tech is reporting that China Unicom told them the phone would officially hit the Chinese market sometime in January. Of course, other places are reporting the phone could see store shelves as early as before Christmas. That seems pretty unlikely to us, but I guess we’ll know for sure soon enough.

Until then, I have a request for Apple, MIIT, China Unicom, and the internet: enough of the intrigue and speculation, K? Let’s just pick a date, launch the phone, and be done with it. This is getting ridiculous.

Yesterday, there was still hope the 4S might see the market sometime soon, as we knew the 8 GB iPhone 4 had been approved by MIIT, but didn’t know whether or not the 4S had. Now, assuming Sina’s China Unicom sources are to be trusted, we know that the 4S has not yet been approved.

Realistically, this means we’re unlikely to see the iPhone 4S in China before January, as even if the handset were approved on Monday, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) and Unicom would likely need a little time for pre-launch promotions and hyping.

But, if I’ve learned one thing from following this story so far, it’s that you never know what’s going to happen, so Penn Olson is officially predicting that the iPhone 4S will be released in China sometime between today and January 5, 2056. Plan accordingly.

Is the iPhone 4S going to be released soon in China? We realize we’ve been torturing you with this for weeks now, but today there’s yet another indication things are pretty close to complete, as China Unicom’s sales department GM Yu Yingtao told Sina Tech:

All we need is for MIIT to issue the network permit for the iPhone 4S and we’ll start selling it, it doesn’t depend on us [...] we’ve already done all of our preparations, we’re just waiting on the permit.

That’s good news because previous reports — while not officially confirmed — do indicate that MIIT has received the device and indeed has already tested it. That means, in essence, that the permit might well come through at any time in the next couple weeks.

Now, despite what Unicom’s rep says, don’t expect to see the phone on shelves the same day MIIT issues the permit. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) takes launches pretty seriously, and while I expect we’ll see the iPhone 4S on the market quite soon, I also expect they’ll take at least a couple days to market and build the hype into the frenzy they’re capable of creating.

Will China explode over this one? There are a bunch of reasons why Chinese consumers shouldn’t care, but we suspect there will be gigantic lines of scalpers eager fans on launch day anyway. When will that day be? No one knows for sure, but at this point, it seems like the smart money might be on sometime in December.

[Via Sina Tech]

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]

This might well be a stunt to capture non-romantically involved smartphone fans (since November 11 is also “Singles Day” here in China), but according to reports on the Beijing Qianlong news website, China Unicom (HKG:0762; NYSE:CHU) will be rolling out the 8GB iPhone 4 on that very day. Prices will drop to 3,999RMB (US$630). For people who’ll be online a lot, there’ll also be the option to get the phone for free.

But there’s a catch — you need to commit to actually spending big on 3G with these people to get the iPhone at the low price of zero. You need to store credit worth 4,999RMB and choose a 3G data plan for a certain number of years to go away with a “free” iPhone. The cheapest option: the 186RMB per month package for three years. (If you’re feeling “expensive”, you can also opt for the 586RMB monthly plan for just one year). Those prices are way above the cheapest 66RMB per month deal that people on unlocked phones can enjoy. Most Chinese dislike such contracted deals, as it ties you to a carrier, and a phone, for years to come. Most people here prefer to pay-as-you-go (with a cheaper 2G or 3G package) on unlocked phone.

For those of you who still are not sure if Unicom’s the right one for you, yours truly relies on the service as an (absolute) essential. During my recent three-month teaching assignment in the northeastern-most reaches of China, 3G was one of the few ways I could still remain “alive” on the Interwebs. China Unicom signal quality is good in cities but a little iffy out in the countryside (or in tall buildings away from the city center).

For eagle eyes, you might also want to note that Apple’s online store has “taken away” the 16 GB and 32 GB versions from us, leaving everyone with “just” an 8 GB model. That’s probably a sign that the iPhone 4S is headed our way soon. But just yesterday we reported concerns that the iPhone 4S model has not yet even gotten regulatory approval, and so could still be many weeks away.

Finally, as a bit of a coincidence on Nov 11: Hong Kong and South Korea (and 13 more countries and regions) will get their iPhone 4S that same day.

I’m wondering if those singles down in HK might feel a little better with a brand-new iPhone 4S on Singles Day. For the unattached, you might want to toy around a little with Siri (in English!) for “company” (if you’re so geekishly inclined)!

[Source: Beijing Qianlong news - article in Chinese]

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.

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]

NetEase Tech

The Infographic of the Day series visually expresses important stories from Asia and the world of technology.

Thanks to Sunny over at TechRice for pointing out this absolutely wonderful graphic created by NetEase Tech. It provides an excellent overview of the Chinese telecom industry, and gives us more than a few crunchy factoids:

• China has 930 million phone users
• China Mobile and China Unicom have 628 and 186 million respectively, as we pointed out a few days ago in our own chart. China Telecom has 113 million.
• Android is the leading smartphone OS, at 43 percent. Symbian and iOS are next with 22 and 18 percent respectively.
• 70 percent of cellphones are made in China.

All that information aside, I’m a little bit jealous over how well made this graphic is. NetEase Tech has made hotspots within the graphic linked to previous content which provides more information on that section. From a publishing perspective that’s amazingly slick. We’ve reposted it below, but if you can read Chinese, do drop over and see the original version and explore the Netease links.

Photo: beta.sj.91.com

It is a plastic film with a chip on top, which you can stick to your original SIM card and have them both work: voice with the original, and 3G with the SIM card sticker. In this way, you don’t have to compromise between 3G and voice quality.

China Mobile is the largest mobile service provider in China – and, indeed, the world – with nearly 630 million subscribers. China Unicom, despite being the official iPhone distributor in the country, is still trying to play catch up (see interactive chart below).

Although Unicom has the better 3G network it still cannot close the gap with China Mobile. Why? Although Unicom’s WCDMA is faster and more widely acknowleged as the best 3G network (compared to China Mobile’s homegrown TD-SCDMA frequency), its nationwide coverage can’t compete with its state-owned rival.

Photo: beta.sj.91.com

So with Unicom’s nifty new trick, you only have to take out your newly-purchased SIM card sticker, remove the adhesive on the back, cut a square hole on your own SIM card with the tool provided by Unicom, and stick the film on top. Now you have – effectively – two SIM cards. And according to Unicom, it supports both SIM and USIM. But you can’t use the two cards at the same time. As an alternative, you can forward your calls from one SIM to the other, but SMSs cannot be forwarded.

This card is a good effort from Unicom to steal some subscribers from its rivals, but the outlook is still unpredictable. Unicom still has the daunting task ahead of improving its network infrastructure, and persuading locals to pay more per month for its 3G services.

[Source: beta.sj.91.com]

We told you it was coming

The tablet is available for China Unicom — a surprise to exactly no one, since that’s the same company Apple has partnered with for all its 3G devices — but Apple doesn’t seem to be making a big deal out of the launch. On its official China website, the company is still pushing the new Macbook Airs and OSX Lion as the featured products. The 3G iPad 2 is available via the site, though, and the prices are exactly what we thought they would be:

• 16 GB model for 4,688 RMB ($732)
• 32 GB model for 5,488 RMB ($857)
• 64 GB model for 6,288 RMB ($982)

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)]

And yet, the 3G tablet is most definitely coming. Yesterday afternoon, Sina Tech posted a screenshot showing that China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has already approved a W-CDMA 3G device for Apple that has the same product ID number as the AT&T 3G iPad 2:

The screenshot shows that the permit was issued by MIIT on August 29, and will be effective throguh August 29, 2014. That’s further evidence that we’ll probably see the official launch of the 3G iPad 2 quite soon.

Since China Unicom is the only Chinese carrier with a W-CDMA 3G network, we can safely assume the 3G iPad 2 will be coming only to China Unicom, or at the very least will be released first through China Unicom. That’s no surprise, as Unicom has been Apple’s partner for all of its 3G device launches to date.

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]

About two weeks ago, a man walked onto a stage and unveiled a game-changing mobile OS. But since he was wearing a peach-colour shirt and not a black turtleneck sweater, we’re not talking about Steve Jobs.

The man in question was Wang Jian, and he gave the world its first peek at the Aliyun phone and mobile OS. As the president of AliCloud – a division of China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba – he explained that the cloud-based smartphone and tablet software was Alibaba’s bid to make China’s first open and convenient mobile OS.

Alibaba’s significant foray into mobile, software, and cloud-computing opened up a lot of questions, so Penn Olson reached out to the company and got some answers from an Alibaba Group spokesperson.

A mobile platform is only as good as its developers – a problem that Android, HP, and BlackBerry are grappling with right now – so this is perhaps the first hurdle that Aliyun faces when it hits the shelves soon on a K-Touch manufactured W700 phone (pictured above and bottom). Chinese app devs will need it to be more affordable than developing for rival platforms, and start-ups will be judging what kind of leverage they can get on the Aliyun OS, compared to launching on Android, iOS or Symbian. The Alibaba spokesperson explains:

The Aliyun OS, coupled with the cloud services provided by AliCloud, greatly reduces the cost and time barriers for developers as they can either develop cloud apps with their own fully developed servers or opt for AliCloud’s cloud infrastructure service at a nominal fee; developers can therefore devote more attention to business innovation. Third-party mobile software developers will be able to use technology such as HTML5 and JavaScript to reduce the complexity in the app development process.

We hope to help third party developers to enter this platform and will hold a developer’s conference later this year for developers to attend and learn how to use the cloud platform and how to develop cloud apps. Aliyun OS may also be integrated with other mobile devices, including mobile phones with larger screens and tablet computers in the coming months.

Aliyun is a custom-made OS that Alibaba has been secretly working on for years, whilst simultaneously publicly building up its AliCloud business. Although it’s not Android-based, it will be fully compatible with Android apps, which might help with initial traction if it means users can still play popular games such as Angry Birds on it.

On the app store front, Alibaba explains to us:

We will provide users with two channels or storefronts to access apps: the first being our cloud app store containing third-party and sister company cloud apps, and the other being the “native app” store that offers Android apps, which can be downloaded and installed onto the mobile device.

A Mobile Gold-Rush

Just as Apple’s iOS was an enticement into Apple’s music and film stores, and Android a way of spiriting more Google ads into people’s hands, so Aliyun will be integral to Alibaba’s B2C and C2C e-commerce platform.

Alibaba seems to have decided to be an exemplar in the Chinese web industry, building its own mobile OS before Baidu, Tencent or anyone else could get there first. It’s undoubtedly inspired by the phenomenal growth in mobile usage in China in recent years, and by the near certainty that mobile net usage will surpass PC web browsing in China by 2013.

Although it’s possible to shop online on Alibaba’s Taobao.com via various mobile apps, the new Aliyun OS raises the prospect of some innovations in phone- or tablet-based shopping in China.

Global Ambitions?

Aliyun seems to be China-bound – for the moment anyway. An Alibaba representative tells as that, “We do not rule out the possibility of the Aliyun OS making its way onto mobile devices outside of China.”

We know that Alibaba will not push into hardware, so the emphasis is on AliCloud and the cloud-based services that are baked-in to the new OS, such as notes (see the middle picture), chat, email, and back-up storage for SMS, contacts, and photos.

Alibaba is not revealing what kind of cloud power they’re packing right now, in contrast to Apple’s very visible US$1 billion data centre/’server farm’ – see it here on CNN – that it’s using to power its upcoming cloud-based features in iOS5. But as China’s biggest e-commerce, group buy, and online payments services – in the form of Alipay – Alibaba surely has the horsepower ready to be unleashed for the Aliyun OS.

On a final, tantalizing note, AliCloud and Aliyun are huge ventures for Jack Ma’s behemoth e-commerce firm. Some might say that this mobile OS is a step towards Alibaba becoming more of a “China’s Google” kind of company than Baidu itself. But for now, Alibaba is insisting that Aliyun is actually just about moving with Chinese consumers to their mobiles, and that the “open” nature of the OS invites competitors to develop for it. An Alibaba spokesperson concludes that Aliyun is simply their way of coming up “with innovative ways to address customer wants and needs. That is where we are putting our energies.”

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]

This week Motorola announced one million smartphones sold in mainland China in Q1 2011 (of course, not all are Android), whilst, at the same time, HTC said they’d triple the number of shops here, to as many as 2000 outlets by the end of this year.

But for both HTC and Motorola, it’s proving to be an ongoing battle to make Google’s Android mobile OS work – and sell – in China, as a result of Google’s troubles in China. Motorola’s CEO, Sanjay Jha, explained to the Wall Street Journal on his current trip to Beijing:

Some of the services that are available on most Android phones are not available here, so we have built relationships with Baidu and Microsoft to enable all of those applications to be available on our devices.

What that means is adding a tablet-spec Tudou app to the Motorola Xoom, for example; or HTC’s tie-up with a Chinese email provider.

HTC Sensation, soon heading to China onto two networks

Also, the Android Market in China is one of the few in the world without paid apps support. Which is where the Moto SHOP4APPS and HTC app stores bring their own tailored selection of free and paid apps.

MT870 vs Sensation

Both Motorola and HTC have new, dual-core, qHD smartphones aimed at business users in China: Motorola’s MT870 (pictured, top) is an Atrix-like beast on TD-SCDMA 3G exclusively for China Mobile. HTC, meanwhile, has the upcoming HTC Sensation (pictured, right) that’ll roll out with China Mobile and China Unicom (as a WCDMA variant).

[Sources: Taiwan Economic News for HTC stats; WSJ Online for Motorola's]

The hawk-eyed spotter is a journalist at one of China’s biggest financial newspapers, so although it’s not a great photo, we have a reliable spotting of Apple’s second-in-command. The journalist posted the photo to her Weibo, where it has since garnered over 3,000 retweets, and nearly 600 comments. In the accompanying text she wrote:

This morning, around 10am, Apple COO Tim Cook is spotted in the lobby of China Mobile’s HQ, accompanied by 7-8 people. Probably Cook is talking with executives from China Mobile to discuss bilateral cooperation for the iPhone. Both China and America flags are seen in the lobby, and Cook seems to be happy.

What Apple COO Tim Cook looks like when he isn't rushing through the lobby of China Mobile HQ

That could well be shaken up when 4G rolls out in China, but that looks set to be a very long way away, since initial 4G TD-LTE testing in China began only a few months ago, and is not yet fully up and running. So, even if the upcoming iPhone 5 – or will it be badged, aptly, as the 4G? – is rocking 4G LTE so as to compete with numerous Android phones that are enjoying the fastest possible mobile data, then it won’t be hitting China in that configuration this year.

So, until we figure out what brings Tim Cook to China Mobile HQ – have a fun trip to Beijing, Mr C.

Thanks to Micgadget for the translation of the Weibo text, included above.

Regional % with net access, see interactive version below

In one particular development effort, China Unicom last Friday announced its intentions to help develop digitization in Sichuan Province. As you no doubt recall, Sichuan was the site of a devastating earthquake back in May of 2008.

China Unicom’s initiative will “further expand the construction of WCDMA networks and beef up WIFI/WAPI services in the region.” The company also intends to improve the fiber-optic network in the region as well.

For more information on China’s internet development, CNNIC released an extensive report last year (pdf) which is still very relevant to the discussion.

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Docomo places 6th in global revenue

Here’s an interesting report from Wireless Intelligence ranking the top 20 global mobile operators according to revenue.

As you might expect, China Mobile is way out front with revenue of almost US$20 million in Q4 2010. Japanese provider NTT Docomo comes in sixth at 11.5 billion, but did so with a fraction of the customer base (57.2 million as opposed to China Mobile’s 584 million). Other Japanese operators, au (KDDI) and Softbank finished at 11 and 13 respectively.

Examining the year-on-year growth percentage from the report tells a far different story however, as Indian provider Bharti Airtel posted a 63.6 percent gain. China Unicom also did well improving 21.5 percent on the previous year, as did Softbank at 14 percent.

For a closer look at the numbers, you can filter according to category below.