China’s Top Telecoms Face Sabotage in Expansion into Schools

All three of China’s major telecom carries — China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom — are trying to provide schools with internet and mobile services that rank among China’s best. It’s a noble endeavor, but also a selfish one — snagging students as customers can be quite profitable if they maintain their loyalty to the brand after they graduate. But Sina Tech is reporting all three companies have faced sabotage in their attempts to expand onto college campuses.

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)]