Two stories: Xiaolingtong or - you don't need an expensive mobile phone service and Arrested in China for illegal VoIP service
If you think about mobile communication, you think about Samsung, Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and so on. You think about 2.5 G, 3G, may be you are aware of 4G. May be, you still remember the expressions GSM or AMPS - but basically you would think about upgrading, upgrading and one more time - upgrading.
Right? Well, not always - a company in China called Xiaolingtong offers cheap service - voice communications and SMS only (hear hear), spotty service, no roaming and very limited coverage - and its service is booming. There are 50 million users in China that use their service - a simple service based on cordless-phone technology - and the company is growing rapidly.
As the Wall Street Journal points out that "The phones, as small and sleek as regular cellphones, are powered by rooftop-mounted base stations, which are specially equipped antennas that send signals a little more than a mile. That's a lot farther than cordless phones that allow callers to roam as far as their backyards before losing reception. Yet call quality can be patchy because the network is lower-powered than traditional cellphone systems. And users sometimes have problems getting a signal when they move around within a city and their call moves to a new base station." (.
Why is it booming? Because it is way cheaper - about 50% - compared to other services and other mobiles. And China has still got a huge number of people, even in cities, that are very, very poor but need something to communication.
Interestingly, and showing China's ambiguous attitude to technology regulators allow the service to grow or even to exist - Chinese regulators have quietly allowed Xiaolingtong to flourish even though the operators of the service are fixed-line phone companies without official wireless licenses.
This compares positively to another story - where a man was arrested in China because he ran an illega wireless voice-over-internet (VoIP) service. He was arrested after police raided his premises and found a number of facilities, including an illegal Internet gateway. His business activities were discovered when he started to advertise and offer cheaper call services to foreign companies - not smart enough.
Apparently, he took US$360,000 in VOiP services, resulting in an alleged loss of around US$ 1 million to state-owned companies - and here is the sad part.
We can assume that since they are state-owned, they can intervene against the man. It might be interesting to note that 36% of China Mobile's customer, one of the leading mobile operators in China with partial ownership by the Chinese Ministry of Information industry, also own a Xiaolingtong mentioned above, which might explain that the government does not intervene in its operations.
Right? Well, not always - a company in China called Xiaolingtong offers cheap service - voice communications and SMS only (hear hear), spotty service, no roaming and very limited coverage - and its service is booming. There are 50 million users in China that use their service - a simple service based on cordless-phone technology - and the company is growing rapidly.
As the Wall Street Journal points out that "The phones, as small and sleek as regular cellphones, are powered by rooftop-mounted base stations, which are specially equipped antennas that send signals a little more than a mile. That's a lot farther than cordless phones that allow callers to roam as far as their backyards before losing reception. Yet call quality can be patchy because the network is lower-powered than traditional cellphone systems. And users sometimes have problems getting a signal when they move around within a city and their call moves to a new base station." (.
Why is it booming? Because it is way cheaper - about 50% - compared to other services and other mobiles. And China has still got a huge number of people, even in cities, that are very, very poor but need something to communication.
Interestingly, and showing China's ambiguous attitude to technology regulators allow the service to grow or even to exist - Chinese regulators have quietly allowed Xiaolingtong to flourish even though the operators of the service are fixed-line phone companies without official wireless licenses.
This compares positively to another story - where a man was arrested in China because he ran an illega wireless voice-over-internet (VoIP) service. He was arrested after police raided his premises and found a number of facilities, including an illegal Internet gateway. His business activities were discovered when he started to advertise and offer cheaper call services to foreign companies - not smart enough.
Apparently, he took US$360,000 in VOiP services, resulting in an alleged loss of around US$ 1 million to state-owned companies - and here is the sad part.
We can assume that since they are state-owned, they can intervene against the man. It might be interesting to note that 36% of China Mobile's customer, one of the leading mobile operators in China with partial ownership by the Chinese Ministry of Information industry, also own a Xiaolingtong mentioned above, which might explain that the government does not intervene in its operations.
posted by Andreas @ 8:04 pm
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