BEIJING—In more than 200 cities throughout China, China Telecom has launched its Xiaolingtong PHS service, putting pressure on mobile carriers China Mobile and China Unicom.
China Telecom does not have a mobile license but got away with the PHS service because it stayed away from big cities. Xiaolingtong is called the poor man’s mobile-phone service, because it is cheap but offers less features than regular service.
When China Telecom launched its Xiaolingtong service in Leshan city in Sichuan Province, China Mobile decided to strike back with a PHS service of its own, called Dalingtong. Da means big in Chinese, versus xiao, which means small, implying that its new service is bigger and better than China Telecom’s offering.
Ted Dean, managing director of telecommunications and technology consultancy BDA (China), argued in the South China Morning Post that outside the big cities there is a substantial untapped market for a PHS service.
Besides being a low-cost alternative to GSM and CDMA services, Dean said another of its strengths may lie in data services, offering speeds of 64 kilobits per second (kbps), much faster than current GSM networks. Therefore, it may also become attractive to high-end customers.
