By Jonah Greenberg
(Washington, DC -- May 16) Wireless Internet service allowing people to access the Internet through their mobile telephone handsets will be offered on a trial basis in 20 cities throughout China, a spokesman for China Unicom, one of the country's three major telecommunications companies, said today.
Hu Qingdong, from China Unicom's chief engineers office, said between 10,000 and 20,000 people in each of the cities will be included in the trial. Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, China's three largest cities, will be in the trial.
"We will slowly enlarge it," Hu said, speaking at telecommunications conference at the Wyndham Washington Hotel on Tuesday. "The Internet and mobile communications are the two fastest-growing sectors in China right now. You can imagine how important the development of WAP is."
WAP stands for "wireless application protocol," the underlying technology of the newest generation of wireless telephones that allow Internet access.
Wireless applications are expected to become the predominant form of Internet access in China, where consumers generally prefer mobility over fixed line telecommunications service. Many companies are planning to introduce news, sports and entertainment headlines and stock trading over WAP-enabled cellular phones.
Relatively Inexpensive
"Now people in China have another mode of Internet access, which will begin to pick up speed now," said Dr. Hui Pan, chief economist at Information Gatekeepers Inc., the sponsors of Tuesday's conference. There are currently over 40 million cellular phone subscribers in China. "All those users can become Internet users immediately if they choose to," Pan said.
Setting up the networks required to offer this trial service was "relatively inexpensive," according to Hu, who said the program cost the company about RMB 80 million (US$9.75 million) in each city.
China Mobile, which last year was made independent of its mother company, the telecom giant China Telecom, began offering a similar trial service in March of this year. While many foreign and domestic companies fit into the food chain of WAP content production, China Mobile and China Unicom are, so far, the only two operators with the permission and the network ability to offer WAP services.
WAP content will face the same censorship and government monitoring as other Internet content, Hu said. But he quickly added that WAP services are more oriented to convenience and mobility. He suggested that users will not be looking through their wireless Internet service for in-depth news content.
Nokia's Roll-Out
"The advantage of WAP is to provide real-time news and stock information," Hu said. "Political news would be hard to read on such a small screen. Internet-ready handsets now available in China are made by Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola, according to Hu.
The Nokia's 1770 has had the most successful roll-out thus far, industry experts from Beijing at the conference said.
No domestic brands have yet emerged with the technology.
Developing a mature and marketable WAP service requires that Internet content providers (ICPs) rewrite their content into WAP protocol, which can be burdensome and labor intensive, and often requires cooperation between service providers, content providers, and the equipment makers.
"It's not like a couple years ago, when everything was done by the operator itself," said Zhu Qiliang, a professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, and general director of the Telecom Research and Development Center. Instead, WAP service providers like China Unicom and China Mobile need to work together with the portals and ICPs. According to China Unicom's Hu, the company has a content agreement with byair, a WAP content service provider.
A Moving Environment
Other ICP's like Sina.com and Sohu.com will also be accessible through the new service, Hu said.
Preparing content in WAP protocol is often initiated by the manufacturers of the handsets used to browse it, Zhu said, because they are most likely to troubleshoot problems in the graphic display of WAP signals. Glitches in image quality and content transfer will most likely plague WAP services in this early phase, Hu said.
"It's ordinary, it always happens in a trial situation," he said.
All WAP services in China offer subscribers only the ability to browse or view content with a wireless device. More attractive applications, like online stock trading and business transactions, will be introduced in later phases.
WAP applications will take off in China in answer to market needs, Zhu said.
Consumers "need service in a moving environment," he said. "Mobility is a key point, people always travel." In China, with the urban population enjoying rapidly growing average incomes, consumers are increasingly likely to demand modern conveniences of mobile data capability, in addition to voice.
To reach Jonah Greenberg email: jgreenberg@virtualchina.com
