China Practically Unreachable By Western SMS?

Ainsy writes "A friend of mine recently began a placement as an English pronunciation teacher in China. She has picked up a pay-as-you go sim for use over there, only to discover that China seems to have been almost completely overlooked by international communications agreements, specifically from the UK. A bit of snooping tells me that Vodafone is the only network from which it is possible to send SMS to a Chinese registered mobile phone. SMS in China is upscaling massively, and is incredibly cheap currently — even 'premium' SMS info services cost 1 Yuan (that's just £0.081 GBP). I'm curious why such a large section of the world market is cut off from the west's wireless communication networks especially with the recent Olympics putting the spotlight on the nation in general. China mobile is the world's largest carrier ranked by subscriber base (415 million) and isn't even the only carrier to operate in China). There are a few websites around from which SMS can be sent to China for a fee but this is of only limited use when on the move. Can anyone tell me why this situation has come about and when we can expect this sort of service to be enabled?"

Comments

Is this for real?

[shidarin'ou]

Can anyone tell me why this situation has come about and when we can expect this sort of service to be enabled?"

Here's an answer to your second question: NEVER

Here's an answer to your first question: Why the hell would the people's republic of china suddenly want to let unfiltered, uncensored text messages into the country while it keeps an iron fist on what their citizens see and hear even over the internet?

Perhaps a more pragmatic answer would be that China will allow text messages to enter into the country when it's able to monitor and censor every text message, and connect a sender to a recipient with their name and current location (to allow for quick and easy arrests), and know who to detain when they enter the country.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell would the people's republic of china suddenly want to let unfiltered, uncensored text messages into the country while it keeps an iron fist on what their citizens see and hear even over the internet?

This is exactly what I thought. Blaming "the rest of the world" is idiotic. Sending SMSes to China requires a cross-connect agreement, which means both sides have to agree to connect. Why does the author think it's nothing to do with the Chinese themselves?

Re:Is this for real?

[Aphoxema]

Yeah, because we know that SMS messages are way more valuable than a phone call or email.

Re:Is this for real?

[Threni]

> Here's an answer to your first question: Why the hell would the people's republic of china suddenly want to let unfiltered, uncensored text
> messages into the country while it keeps an iron fist on what their citizens see and hear even over the internet?

There can't be an easier to control method of communication than SMS. You need a carrier in your country which delivers the messages to phones, which will be forced to allow monitoring; the messages are 160 characters each and text-only; the phone they're being sent to can be trivially geographically located etc. If you're going to keep a close eye on your subjects, you're going to watch to encourage SMS over any other system.

It's exactly like in the UK/US, where all companies involved in communication (phone, parcels/mail, tv, radio) are controlled completely by their governments - there's no way of sending information without the authorities knowing who sent it to who. Encryption is something of a false hope, given that countries will either prohibit it or, slightly more sensibly, pass laws empowering courts to punish subjects for not revealing their passwords and/or decrypt the messages on demand.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is 8p (~15 cents) incredibly cheap?

Re:Is this for real?

[xaxa]

How is 8p (~15 cents) incredibly cheap?

He says that's the cost for a 'premium' service, whatever that is. I've never used one myself (a normal SMS in the UK is anywhere from 0p to about 10p, depending on the provider).

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

True, in the USA SMS carriers are bound by CALEA and are forced to "cooperate" with Law Enforcement. That means that every and each SMS, MMS or Call Detail Record MUST be recorded on a log file, and MUST be available to any US Law Enforcement agency. So, monitor people SMSes won't be a problem for the Chinese as the US Government has been doing that for like 5 years now...

Re:Is this for real?

[Sigismundo]

It's probably a monthly fee, and not a per-message charge?

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have no idea how much the call will cost than the SMS.

Once you are there, you will finally understand why so SMS is so popular in China.

No one wants to his/her privacy be monitored by others, including the government.

Re:Is this for real?

[CountBrass]

"There can't be an easier to control method of communication than SMS." of course there is, don't allow it at all.

Re:Is this for real?

[heelrod]

this is all crap.

I lived in Beijing for a year, and TXT'd my friends here in the US all the time using the china mobile sim card.

works just fine.

Re:Is this for real?

[AndrewNeo]

Your friends must have wanted to murder you after all those international text charges.

Re:Is this for real?

[mystful]

Skype allows text messages to be sent from anywhere in the world for a very reasonable fee. All of my Chinese friends (on multiple carriers) have been able to send text messages to my American (ATT) cell phone as well...

Re:Is this for real?

[timeOday]

Why the hell would the people's republic of china suddenly want to let unfiltered, uncensored text messages into the country while it keeps an iron fist on what their citizens see and hear even over the internet?

Oooh, scary. Did you even read the summary? "A bit of snooping tells me that Vodafone is the only network from which it is possible to send SMS to a Chinese registered mobile phone." If it's already possible via Vodafone, that indicates it's a business rather than government issue.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose you can dam the river an hope it doesn't overtop your dam, or allow water through and generate power from that

Re:Is this for real?

[Spikeman56]

The parent has it all wrong. Like many things in China, to the untrained eye it looks like some direct attempt to refrain free speech. In reality it's completely economic...

China Mobile _could_ allow anyone to send for free on their network, but frankly, very few people (relatively speaking) care. In a country so big and self-dependent, international texting doesn't matter.

Opening up free internet based SMSs does little other than open up a HUGE hole for people to commercialize on China Mobile's service. China Mobile, being a government owned corporation, wants to ensure that it holds a monopoly on innovation on its network. This is largely why you see very little new things in terms of SMS happening in China, because if someone attempted anything, China Unicom would simply block their service and duplicate it.

It's not about rights, it's all about money


PS: Skype can send to Chinese phones (I'm in China so I've looked into this)

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because we know that SMS messages are way more valuable than a phone call or email.

Assuming you saying that with sarcasm... *Uncensored* SMS messages are inherently more valuable than a *censored* phone call or email...

Re:Is this for real?

[shidarin'ou]

Oooh, scary. Did you even read the summary? "A bit of snooping tells me that Vodafone is the only network from which it is possible to send SMS to a Chinese registered mobile phone." If it's already possible via Vodafone, that indicates it's a business rather than government issue.

Obviously, the fact that google is searchable from inside china indicates that it's a business rather than government issue there too.

Re:Is this for real?

[mrops]

Working in telecom for the last few years, I think you are speculating.

This sort of things more often than not happens because of lacking business arrangements. A simple thing as sending a SMS involves agreements at a business level as well as at a technical level.

Often providers are cheap and they don't want to pay a clearing house to handle international SMS, they need to do this to stay competitive in the local market at the expense of borderline cases. This could be your UK provider or the Chinese one.

Same is true for banks, my bank charges me 12$ a month, however I have a few extra services, one being the benefit of withdrawing money from any ATM in the world that accepts a VISA/Plus network (a lot of them do). Part of my 12$ goes to pay Visa/Plus network. My previous no fee banking account at another bank had no such feature, I painfully discovered this stuck in India not able to get money easily.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? SMS certianly does support Chinese characters, as there are literally BILLIONS of text messages been sent in China each day, almost all in Chinese. All cell phones sold in China contains an input program that allows input of chinese characters using ordinary keypad.

The main reasons for lack of interconnect between foreign phone carriers and Chinese carriers could be either government censorship, or inability of the carriers to come to an agreement on what's reasonable price to charge.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

The companies who are involved in communication are controlled by the government or is the government controlled by them?

Re:Is this for real?

[psydeshow]

What are you talking about? SMS certianly does support Chinese characters, as there are literally BILLIONS of text messages been sent in China each day, almost all in Chinese.

Mod parent up.

Wife's Ukrainian cellphone expects entry in Cyrillic, with autocomplete.

There is absolutely no reason to suspect that Chinese cellphones don't speak Chinese. Heck, we're lucky they speak English, given the relative size of the markets.

Re:Is this for real?

[raju1kabir]

No. A more pragmatic answer would be that SMS does not and probably will never support Chinese characters, or logograms of any kind. It probably doesn't even support languages written in Greek or Cyrillic characters. SMS can created by latin script societies, and like ASCII before it, probably makes the most possible use out of the fairly small latin character set.

How on earth was this rated +4, insightful? It's patently retarded. I think a lot of people just score up anything that's longer than a few paragraphs without actually reading it.

I live in Malaysia where people send Chinese text messages all day long. I get them now and then as wrong numbers (my friends know I don't read Chinese). When I travel to Thailand I get Thai SMS spam on my phone all damn night long when I'm trying to sleep.

I did not install any special software or do anything special to my phone; it just worked. Worked with my previous phone too.

When I set my phone's input language to Chinese, the number of characters I can type per SMS charging unit changes from 160 to 70. A few seconds of googling based on that discovery turned up the fact that SMS messages can be encoded in UCS2 which allows most if not all Unicode characters. Read here: http://www.dreamfabric.com/sms/ for more than you ever wanted to know about the message format.

Re:Is this for real?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

While an SMS service exists in China, I was speaking from the point of view of sending and receiving SMS messages to and from China. I doubt that the existing networks or handsets are compatible with each other, and the main reason for the lack of connectivity with Chinese or other networks is that the telcoms companies have not bothered to invest in the necessary upgrades. Given that international SMS text messages still cost a pretty penny, there is likely little demand for them to do so at this time.

I could be wrong, but based on the summary, I think the mobile telcoms firms are every bit as complacent as I suspect.

Re:Is this for real?

[mpapet]

Skype allows text messages to be sent from anywhere in the world for a very reasonable fee.

This is because skype is using some SIP-like protocol over the Internet, forwarding the message to their SMS gateway in the region. Skype is charging you Princely rates for this luxury. This is very different than going mobile-to-mobile.

Are your friends able to text mobile-to-mobile from China to you? What's the cost you pay for each of those international text messages? Another princely sum I'm sure.

Re:Is this for real?

[Yvanhoe]

I would like to also point out that SMS and cell phones services are the first things switched off by the authorities when a riot occurs somewhere. They fear that such uprising could propagate very quickly in some regions.

Re:Is this for real?

[Dogtanian]

Parent modded flamebait? Is this intentional troll-modding, or does someone just not like what he/she has to say? I found it very interesting, personally.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course you can send information without authorities knowing who sent it.

1) Pay cash for your phone and stock it with minutes from cards purchased with cash. SMS to your heart's contentment.

2) Use a public access portal to hit the internet and use any of numerous web sites to send the SMS message.

Re:Is this for real?

[mpapet]

No. A more pragmatic answer would be that SMS does not and probably will never support Chinese characters, or logograms of any kind

They have chinese input for PC's, then eventually, they'll have a localized mobile phone keyboard. That is, if they don't already.

Your anecdotes about other languages suffer from various problems too.

Re:Is this for real?

[pythonist]

Language barrier.

Most people in China simply don't read English messages and cellphones in states can't display Chinese at all (additional fonts required).

Those in both countries who can read each others are tiny faction thus market is extremely limited.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an answer to your second question: NEVER

Here's an answer to your first question: Why the hell would the people's republic of china suddenly want to let unfiltered, uncensored text messages into the country while it keeps an iron fist on what their citizens see and hear even over the internet?

This type of attitude has been cropping up very often around the Olympics and it makes me so angry. China has had a more advanced cell network than the USA for years and texting there was a primary form of communication long before it took off in the States. You can buy contract-less phones there and be just as anonymous as an ac. You can send messages to many foreign carriers at ridiculously low rates. I have personally sent and received messages into and out of China. It is the poor service and price-gouging practices of Western companies that is the problem here, not some evil Chinese plan to hurt its own people.

Re:Is this for real?

[laserbeak43]

then why can i instant message and videophone people in china. there's more to the story than what China's doing IMO. not that i know, but i see a lot of holes in the stories.

Re:Is this for real?

[denzacar]

No communication is NOT communication.

And snooping on 2 people NOT communicating is sure as hell going to get you far less information than snooping on 2 people communicating.
Not to mention all those wonderful causes for search and seizure, arrest and imprisonment. Not necessarily in that order.
Like "We have proof that you have been communicating with foreign powers that are conspiring against our beautiful land."

Re:Is this for real?

[raju1kabir]

While an SMS service exists in China, I was speaking from the point of view of sending and receiving SMS messages to and from China. I doubt that the existing networks or handsets are compatible with each other, and the main reason for the lack of connectivity with Chinese or other networks is that the telcoms companies have not bothered to invest in the necessary upgrades. Given that international SMS text messages still cost a pretty penny, there is likely little demand for them to do so at this time.

Everything you say is still wrong.

UCS2-encoded SMS is a standard and works between handsets and networks. You honestly think that the billion Chinese speakers have all segregated themselves by handset maker, and Nokia users only SMS with other Nokia users? It's a preposterous notion and obviously false.

The "lack of connectivity with Chinese or other networks" hasn't been demonstrated. It's been asserted and then met with scores of counterexamples in this discussion. I myself have carried a phone to some 50 countries in the past few years, most of them poor and haggard, and my phone has worked in all of them (except Japan and Korea, where I had to rent at the airport). China included. I have received welcome messages and spam in the local scripts, as well as roaming info messages from my own Malaysian carrier in English. My friends have SMSed me and the messages have instantaneously appeared on my phone.

SMS messages may cost you a pretty penny, but it doesn't mean they're expensive in the abstract. My carrier charges me a flat EUR0.04 per outbound international text no matter where it's to, and they are making a profit doing it. So the raw cost (whatever they pay to the SMS exchange company) is clearly less than that.

What I think we have here, is an OP whose own carrier had some sort of problem exchanging messages with one number in China when he tried once or twice. Which is more forgivable than you, who are pulling cardinal nonsense straight out of your arse based on nothing at all.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

"There can't be an easier to control method of communication than SMS." of course there is, don't allow it at all.

I don't know why parent is modded Funny. That's exactly the fallacy we're talking about: that blocking a channel is a good way to control communication. It's the worst way, because communication will just find other, less controllable or even unknown channels.

Re:Is this for real?

[BhaKi]

Sending SMSes to China requires a cross-connect agreement, which means both sides have to agree to connect. Why does the author think it's nothing to do with the Chinese themselves?

And why do most people think it's got something to do with the Chinese? Because, the US government has spent a lot of money secretly to initiate online propaganda against the Chinese.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah...or it could be because China is well know for wanting to control their citizens access to information & communications, and China is one of the few countries people seem to have any major problem sending SMS' to. I'd imagine Burma and North Korea are pretty tough too.

Re:Is this for real?

[Tuidjy]

What the Hell are you smoking? Cell-phones in Bulgaria have Cyrilics by default. I would be amazed to learn that Russian cellphones don't. Furthermore, text messages are widely used in China. If I had to make a guess, I'd say that these messages are in Chinese.

Yes, it is true that many European languages are adapting to Latin and ASCII. Hell, even people from countries that are still holding will transcribe their language with Latin letters. But at least in Bulgaria it is considered bad form, and many websites will automatically remove posts that use Latin transcription.

Convenience is important, and one of the next generations will probably stick the last nail in the coffin of Greek, Cyrilics, etc. alphabets. But the problem is hardly a technological one.

Re:Is this for real?

[kabocox]

While anglophones are quick to suggest "Just Learn American!", that probably isn't going to work out so smoothly. If the western computer and telecommunications industry expects China to fit into the english/ASCII/QWERTY mould, they are probably going to be disappointed. The reality is that sooner or later, western tech is going to have to fit into the China mould. Otherwise, the Chinese will fill that mold themselves.

The sad part is that it would most likely be easier for the Chinese to adopt English rather than try to make their character set computer friendly. O.k. They could just come up with their own character set that includes every single one of those thousands of chinese symbols. They'd have two choices from there though. Design a new chinese keyboard (very possible) or try to adapt an querty keyboard to access those thousands of characters... I shudder to think it, but they'd have to force chinese to fit into the querty character set just for entry... Damn difficult/annoying task that. I'd hope with 1 billion people thinking about it that they could design an input device that lets them use their native language rather than adopt english.

Re:Is this for real?

[Aphoxema]

Nonsense, unless the cost of phone calls and emails in China are, what, millions of times what it is in the US?

Re:Is this for real?

[Ainsy]

I should have mentioned this in my original post, but my friend can send messages to me just fine, it is messages from UK to china which do not reach the recipient.

Re:Is this for real?

[Apache]

For each SMS containing a banned word, simply forge a second SMS from the same sender that says "Just kidding."

Seems to work fine for their main "firewall."

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't allow communication at all? I think you misunderstood the GP's post.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps a more pragmatic answer would be that China will allow text messages to enter into the country when it's able to monitor and censor every text message....

No. A more pragmatic answer would be that SMS does not and probably will never support Chinese characters, or logograms of any kind. It probably doesn't even support languages written in Greek or Cyrillic characters. SMS can created by latin script societies, and like ASCII before it, probably makes the most possible use out of the fairly small latin character set.

Don't underestimate the impact of this problem. Recently, the German government embark on a multi billion euro effort to rewrite decades of government and other offical documents so as to remove the now "archaic" Eszett character and replace it with double "s"es ("ss"). When I studied German, only ten years ago, this character was still on the course. It was actually quite a useful little glyph, given the occurrence of double "s"es in the language.

But it's gone now. The reason is painfully evident. There is no Eszett character on the Qwerty keyboard or in the ASCII character set. The emergence of unicode was not enough to save it. It probably won't be the last casualty.

Things like accents, graves and umlauts will probably suffer the same fate. I remember meeting a young Sweedish office worker about problems with database inputs. Basically, customer names(the customers were also Sweedish) would often be missing umlauts on their "o"'s and the like. It emerged that the office worker inputting the names had no idea how to make an unlauted "o". The guy was a trained typist, from Sweeden, and he didn't know how to type letters of his own language using a Qwerty keyboard on an ASCII based PC. He wasn't alone.

These problems have emerged because computers were developed and are still being developed by english speakers and writers, for english speakers and writers. The computer industry was and is still centered in and on America, and other nations and speakers usually have to work around this. Rampant incompatibilities, lack of hardware support and a lack of resources and interest in the problem have lead to people, and governments, taking the easier option and just modifying their written languages to fit QWERTY and ASCII.

The Irish government in fact already did this for the Irish language as far back as 1948, in a sweeping spelling reform which moved the entire language from Gaelic script to the Latin alphabet. The move was so total that most Irish people (who admittedly don't speak irish very much anyway) do not even know that irish was ever written in anything other than latin script. This is probably a portent for the eventual fate of every other european written language, particularly smaller ones. They will change to fit ASCII/QWERTY, not the other way around.

So in short, no, SMS is not going to change. It's not going to support other characters and languages. Ever. And telephone companies are simply going to expect others to adapt their own written word to existing systems instead. The trouble is, while this may work for european languages, it is NOT going to work for Chinese and related languages. There are literally thousands of Chinese characters, and without them, speakers from different parts of the country will not be able to communicate at all as their spoken languages are in fact mutually unintelligible.

While anglophones are quick to suggest "Just Learn American!", that probably isn't going to work out so smoothly. If the western computer and telecommunications industry expects China to fit into the english/ASCII/QWERTY mould, they are probably going to be disappointed. The reality is that sooner or later, western tech is going to have to fit into the China mould. Otherwise, the Chinese will fill that mold themselves.

The quoted material is just blatantly incorrect and ignorant and based on misunderstanding of the reasons for spelling changes in various languages. It is really easy to enter esset and accented characters from a keyboard. The Swedish typist in question was incompetent. Sweden, Germany etc do not use qwerty keyboards. These locales have their own keyboard layouts.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Japanese phones exchange text messages in non-Latin characters (hiragana, katakana, kanji). Are those text messages sent/received using some method other than SMS?

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does the author think it's nothing to do with the Chinese themselves?

Just to pick a very, very important nit, it has less to do with the Chinese people than than with the Chinese Government.

Re:Is this for real?

[tpchur]

Um, I'm currently in a German 101 course and the eszett symbol is still in use. My textbook is current published in 2007.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, this is just plain wrong. There are no plans to remove the ß from the German language. There was an orthography reform that established a clear rule when to use ß and when to use ss:
After short vowels, you now use ss : e.g. Kuss
After long vowels, you still use ß : e.g. Straße

There are some words that were subsequently changed from ß to ss, but only some. And there are another 6 non-ASCII characters in the German language anyway: the umlauts ÄäÖöÜü

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

You type it in phoneticaly and then select the specific characters you want from a list after you complete the word.

The Japanese use that system, I assume it is the same in China.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't underestimate the impact of this problem. Recently, the German government embark on a multi billion euro effort to rewrite decades of government and other offical documents so as to remove the now "archaic" Eszett character and replace it with double "s"es ("ss"). When I studied German, only ten years ago, this character was still on the course. It was actually quite a useful little glyph, given the occurrence of double "s"es in the language.

But it's gone now. The reason is painfully evident. There is no Eszett character on the Qwerty keyboard or in the ASCII character set. The emergence of unicode was not enough to save it. It probably won't be the last casualty.

Really?? Dass ist aber ein Großer Fehler. You are referring to the Neuer Rechtschreibreform, where they have tried to simplify the rules of grammer. The "ß" still exists, but not in as many words. Please check for accuracy before you post. Just google for "Neuer Rechtschreibreform", of see here http://www.staff.uni-marburg.de/~schittek/rechtsch.htm#1.1

Re:Is this for real?

[pleappleappleap]

Why?

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was also going to shoot this down.

Look at Japan as another example, they probably text more per capita than any other country, and they use their own alphabets.
You can be 100% certain that without native alphabet support the Japanese would never have used SMS in the first place, they are just too nationalistic. (Not saying it's a bad thing, just a fact.)

I'm going to throw a wild guess based on nothing but conjecture regarding the SMS situation in China:

Censorship issues- not technical on the Chinese side, but an unwillingness on the 'foreign' carriers to implement audits that the Chinese require.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, just wow. "Das ist...", adjectives are usually not capitalized in German, "Reform" is feminine, and it's "Rechtschreibreform" and "neue Rechtschreibung", not "neue Rechtschreibreform".

Maybe you should write in English if you want to correct somebody and be credible?

Re:Is this for real?

[steelfood]

I call BS on the second argument.

SMS is no more private than webmail, and in some cases, even less so. There are anonymous webmail providers out there. There is no equivalent for SMS.

Besides, China doesn't have to monitor and censor every message, only the ones from the outspoken people. China's "free speech" is only a little worse than in the US; you can say all you want about the government, but just not too loudly. The only difference is that you can't get jailed for that infraction alone in the US, though you can get harassed and even arrested.

More than likely, it's a matter of not being economical, or the inability to draw a contract.

Re:Is this for real?

[antic]

Was in China for three weeks recently using global roaming and found that around half of my messages heading out of China were not received by the intended recipient at all. I do suspect, however, that I was charged for them.

My brother, first using roaming, had a problem whereby messages would send 3-12 times each. He then switched to a local sim and we believe that all messages from that point were sent/received OK.

Re:Is this for real?

[Aphoxema]

I don't know, how many 10 cent SMS messages can you fit in your phone calls?

Re:Is this for real?

[DaveV1.0]

Nope, you are completely wrong.

SMS is very popular in Japan and China. And, international interoperability between many U.S. carriers and China is going quite well. I know because I work for a company that makes it possible. We have millions of SMS and MMS messages flowing through our servers to many different countries.

Most cell phones are loaded area specific alphabets, so Greek, Cryllic, and even Arabic is available on phones. I know because I worked for a major international cell phone manufacturer and have seen the phones.

Maybe you should actually learn about a subject before you prove your ignorance.

Re:Is this for real?

[Goaway]

It may be possible to send chinese characters over SMS, but that does not mean any western phone supports displaying those characters.

Re:Is this for real?

[Goaway]

Somehow I don't really think that has anything to do with being nationalistic and more about not being able to write characters in your native language.

You think SMS would be used here if it only supported cyrillic?

Re:Is this for real?

[DaveV1.0]

You are wrong. My company provides inter-carrier service between some U.S. carriers and a number of Asian countries, including China. Many of those messages contain kanzi characters.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

I SMS my Father in Shanghai from Canada all the time.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

it keeps an iron fist on what their citizens see and hear even over the internet

More like a damp mitten. From personal experience I can confirm that most of the web is not blocked in China and those sites that are are easily reachable by means of proxies. They have simply made it inconvienient or requiring a slight technical ability to visit certain sites for the majority of people.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

major offtopic, but for what reason does one visit 50 countries in a few year? did someone tie your shoelaces to a weatherballoon ?

Re:Is this for real?

[root-a-begger]

hold on now. the post did not say "when will china allow unfiltered, uncensored text messages".

You can have cheap and reliable SMS into China and still have "great firewall" style filtering and censorship. SPAM SMSs are already a problem domestically in China and there is pressure to get it under control for both censorship reasons and for annoyance reasons.

There already exists SMS from China to other countries for reasonable rates through China Mobile. In fact, while I was in the U.S. last month, I could put my China Mobile SIM into my phone and send messages around the world from the U.S. for cheaper than any U.S. telecom would allow.

As to why you do not today have cheap SMS "into" China it is because China Mobile operates at a different pace and controls the pace of the game relative to U.S. and EU telecoms. China Mobile does not need this new revenue stream and will take it on on its own schedule and on its terms.

You can see the same thing happening with iPhones in China. When will the iPhone be an official sold item in China? It will happen when Apple needs the deal enough so that China Mobile gets it on their terms.

enough said...its not about censorship. Its about money. The Chinese are great at the "waiting game". And frankly, its their country, so why not allow their pseudo monopolies to protect it?

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

While anglophones are quick to suggest "Just Learn American!", that probably isn't going to work out so smoothly. If the western computer and telecommunications industry expects China to fit into the english/ASCII/QWERTY mould, they are probably going to be disappointed. The reality is that sooner or later, western tech is going to have to fit into the China mould. Otherwise, the Chinese will fill that mold themselves.

Are you sure Anglo-phones don't suggest, "Just learn English"? :-)

Actually, I just saw an article within the past week which stated that there are more people in China _learning_ English than there are actual people in the US _speaking_ English.

When I was taking Irish language classes some 40 years back, the instructor taught us to write in Irish script, using the native diacritical marks for long vowels and aspiration of consonants. But she told us about the changes in orthography, which she put to typewriter manufacturers. To avoid having to build custom typewriters, they replaced the mark for a long vowel, which looked like an acute accent (fada), with a slash after the vowel. They also replaced the dot indicating aspiration of a consonant (name was something like seimhu, pronounced like shayvahah) with an "h" following the consonant. Among other things, these two changes added a number of characters to some words and made it far more difficult to recognize the word in print.

To add insult to injury, when the EC came into being, they needed a symbol (and corresponding keystroke) for the euro. MS chose to overlay it in place of one of the long "e" formerly used on Irish keyboard layouts.

Finally, some fifteen or twenty years ago, the city with the highest number of fax machines per capita was Hong Kong, Specifically because they allowed transmission of Chinese characters, which was then impossible with the ascii character sets in use at the time. Unicode has solved that problem, at least at levels above SMS phones' level.

Re:Is this for real?

[Durf]

SMS isn't so common here in Japan, and just about ever phone comes with its own @docomo.ne.jp (or other carrier domain) email address. This is what most people use to text each other, and it lets them do the same to addresses on computers as well.

SMS does exist on the handsets, I suppose, but I don't know a single person who uses it.

Anyway, so long as SMS itself can handle Unicode text it can carry Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit, Thai, you name it. Beyond that it's just a matter of developing an input system that lets you use the 12-key pad to get the characters on your screen.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is bullshit. I'm a Swede living in China and I have no problems sending and receiving SMSes to/from Sweden.

FYI there's no "iron fist" on what they are allowing people to see online, there's at best some haphazard filtering. People still find whatever info they're looking for, the government here can't keep up with the information flow online.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Here's an answer to your first question: Why the hell would the people's republic of china suddenly want to let unfiltered, uncensored text
> messages into the country while it keeps an iron fist on what their citizens see and hear even over the internet?

There can't be an easier to control method of communication than SMS. You need a carrier in your country which delivers the messages to phones, which will be forced to allow monitoring; the messages are 160 characters each and text-only; the phone they're being sent to can be trivially geographically located etc. If you're going to keep a close eye on your subjects, you're going to watch to encourage SMS over any other system.

It's exactly like in the UK/US, where all companies involved in communication (phone, parcels/mail, tv, radio) are controlled completely by their governments - there's no way of sending information without the authorities knowing who sent it to who. Encryption is something of a false hope, given that countries will either prohibit it or, slightly more sensibly, pass laws empowering courts to punish subjects for not revealing their passwords and/or decrypt the messages on demand.

At least in the USA we have a great constitutional right. Law enforcement cannot force you to do anything that would be self-incriminating. This is our best hope (legally, not activist/populist pressure) IMHO against a McCarthy fascism.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Word: email.

Re:Is this for real?

[raju1kabir]

They'd have two choices from there though. Design a new chinese keyboard (very possible) or try to adapt an querty keyboard to access those thousands of characters... I shudder to think it, but they'd have to force chinese to fit into the querty character set just for entry... Damn difficult/annoying task that.

Are you posting from 1975? What you talk about was solved decades ago already.

Re:Is this for real?

[Abasher]

Would his/her friends be paying for receiving the SMSes? That sounds weird. You can't choose which SMSes to receive, so it's quite illogical that the receiver would pay anything. Nobody in their right mind would accept a deal like that.

Re:Is this for real?

[Dan541]

Ive never had any issues with receiving SMS on China Mobile. I suggest the author get a decent service provider because this problem has never existed for me.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think a lot of people just score up anything that's longer than a few paragraphs without actually reading it.

Mod parent up

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think in Japan they use as much MMS and Email from the phones as SMS. I don't believe using Japan as an example validates a point that you can use other than latin characters in SMSs, but it is true that UCS2 encoding can be used and you can text 70 characters instead of 160 in an SMS if using non-latin characters and many phones support this. Inputting those other characters is another question depending on what input methods the phone has available, and similarly for display will depend on which fonts are installed on the phone. Typically manufacturers will save flash space and royalty costs by only installing the input methods, fonts and translations for the languages of the region surrounding where the phone is being sold. (Additionally to the firmware difference, there are localization variations to the physical handsets themselves with stroke symbols printed about the numbers on the keypad along with the abc, def, ghi etc also printed on the keys for latin input).

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because when roaming you use your home country's short message centre. The available routes for your messages is the same as it would be if you where actually at home. The OP asserts that messages originated from a local SIM, which uses the native SMS-C by default, is not able to interoperate with certain international destinations. This behaviour is not contradicted by your experience.

If the OP's phone and service provider permit it, it may be possible to circumvent these issues by changing the default SMS-C. During the early days of SMS carrier interconnects, this was a well known work around to allow texts to be sent for free in Europe.

Re:Is this for real?

[raju1kabir]

That's because when roaming you use your home country's short message centre. The available routes for your messages is the same as it would be if you where actually at home. The OP asserts that messages originated from a local SIM, which uses the native SMS-C by default, is not able to interoperate with certain international destinations. This behaviour is not contradicted by your experience.

I simplified for the sake of brevity.

I travel with two phones. One holds my home SIM, and one gets a prepaid SIM.

The old beat-up one containing my home SIM is really just for receiving SMS, since that's the number published as "SMS:" on my business card and I don't have any way of forwarding those (anyone know of a service to route SMS to IP?).

The one with the prepaid SIM is used for sending SMS (since it's almost always cheaper than way than via roaming), and for receiving calls (forwarded to it via my VoIP number which is the one I give out).

It's true that the two phones often experience different SMS connectivity gaps (though they're also normally on different local networks, since the one I bought a prepaid card for may not be the first one that my roaming SIM makes friends with).

Nevertheless it works almost all the time on both phones, and it's been many years since I've seen the garbled-text thing from an encoding problem when an SMS is in a non-Latin script.

Re:Is this for real?

[nodrogluap]

Besides, China doesn't have to monitor and censor every message, only the ones from the outspoken people.

I have a friend who was working in the south of China as a tour guide. She visited Beijing after a few months in the country, and was assaulted by a rickshaw driver after he tried to stiff her with a fare with a few extra zeros tacked on. Anyway, she loved being there, but was quite upset after this episode, so she texted a friend back in England and used the phrase "f***ing China" [my masking] in the message. 45 seconds later, she got a message back saying something like "While in China, you must abide by the rules of communication", etc. and the e-mail address she had used when signing up for the mobile account was no longer accessible.

Anyhow, my point is that they must check lots of SMS messages, not just of dissidents.

Re:Is this for real?

[Jellybob]

Or they could just use Unicode.

Spam

[scubamage]

Just think of how bad text message spam would be if those tricksy Chineses were able to reach us? I imagine it's largely preventative given the amount of spam originating from that country.

Re:Spam

[arth1]

Slightly more prosaically, I think many cell phone providers would not know what to do once messages in Big5, GB2312 and UTF-8 start arriving, crashing the outdated phones they subsidize expensive plans with.

Better then, as they see it, to disallow messaging to/from China, Korea and Taiwan.

Re:Spam

[1u3hr]

Just think of how bad text message spam would be if those tricksy Chineses were able to reach us? I imagine it's largely preventative given the amount of spam originating from that country.

Actually most of the "Chinese" spam does not originate there. It's paid for by American spammers, to sell American products. See the ROKSO list if you have any doubts.

Re:Spam

[scubamage]

That's a really good point - however, since most of the phones come from Korea, Taiwan, or China to begin with, I find it hard to believe they couldn't support unicode at the very least. Am I wrong? I know our software is written in unicode to support Korean, Chinese, and Japanese (Korean programming firm).

Re:Spam

[arth1]

From what I can tell, the cell phone versions that do support Asian languages are equipped with more memory than their latin-only counterparts. And a penny saved...

Re:Spam

[VoltCurve]

our SMS's can't reach China, but our SSM's can.

Re:Spam

[amorsen]

Just think of how bad text message spam would be if those tricksy Chineses were able to reach us?

The Western phone companies would love to pass on Chinese spam at a price of 10c or more per SMS...

I doubt the spammers will find that very attractive.

It's so obvious.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Disallow SMS transmissions
2. Set up SMS website at 1 Yuan per message
3. ???
4. PROFIT

same experience from Austria

[kubitus]

to my knowledge no mobile phone provider passes SMS from Austria to China. ( which would ease the time difference for communication )

Monopoly of China mobile

[sakdoctor]

China Telecom & China mobile are no longer actual monopolies, but still control enough of the market to be very monopolistic in nature.

You can expect SMS interoperability...never, and the last I heard, they were pissed off with the potential of skype-like services cutting into their profits and were going after skype-out with great vengeance and furious anger.

Re:Monopoly of China mobile

[sponga]

Did you walk the valley of death?

Censorship

[gsslay]

Wow. Don't follow international politics much, do you?

Re:Censorship

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people don't.

I am currently thinking of moving to the Bay Area (California) and I am amazed at how much of an affluence bubble that exists there (and San Diego, Suburbs).

I live in a very poor part of a large city. Drug dealers and prostitutes are the norm. I point them out to my out of town visitors they gasp. People still do that? they ask.

The reality is that 'rich' people (top 4% of US) are not often exposed to the 'real' world.

The thought of me slaughtering my own animals is barbaric from fellow chicken eaters who understand chick to come in little trays from the grocery store. A "whole" chicken is foreign.

To those who experience a DIFFERENT government first hand, and the ramifications - I am constantly overjoyed. It is a big and diverse world and not for the timid.

My favorite joy was opening the first paycheck of a highschooler. I'd ask them to open in front of me. They assumed they made minimum wage but in reality they made less due to taxes. Their world just doubled in size right before their eyes.

The whole kit and kaboodle . .

[arizwebfoot]

is handled by the same people who verified the Chinese Gymnasts ages.

You know the ones who they say were 16, but really 14 and looked really 12?

Re:The whole kit and kaboodle . .

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod this up, it was funny.

Have you tried it

[Anonymous Coward]

I was in China for 5 weeks with a China Mobile cell phone and had no problems with SMS to my girlfriends US (Verizon) cell phone

Re:Have you tried it

[sunking2]

Wow, you have multiple girl friends. You rock, but you're also a hog.

Re:Have you tried it

[Dan541]

It was the same for me.

The problem is nothing to do with China and everything to do with the United States shitty cellphone networks.

Shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

I write this from a small city in Fujian province (the south of China), and can tell you from experience that O2 and T-Mobile can also send SMS messages from the UK to my China Mobile PAYG phone here. It sounds to me like your friend has a bad phone...

Re:Shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can western devices send SMS in a Chinese Characters set ? or must the Chinese recipient know Pin- Yin etc., How do Chinese to Chinese send SMS text?. What Character set is used?

So even if my USA device can do SMS , mine can only input ASCII English characters on my device, So how do I communicate with you
?

Re:Shenanigans!

[francium de neobie]

If you go to Finland are you forced to send messages only in Finnish? No?

If you go to Poland are you forced to send messages only in Polish? No?

Same for China.

Re:Shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

What a dumb Answer

Were talking about TEXT messaging
Chinese is not the same as Finnish!!
    Chinese uses No Alphabet!!\

  It's Charachter set is in deference to your post Pictures ,
Chinese People do not commuinicate with an alphabet as we do in Finnish or English ,
Many western SMS text devices have no way of Inputting Chinese charachters .

 

Re:Shenanigans!

[JediLow]

Same here - I've gotten text messages from China. During Chinese New Year I received 3 or 4 text messages from friends that I have in Qinghai...

Re:Shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,
Could you please provide us with your current location?

Sincerely,
Chinese Authorities

Re:Shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

Chinese does not use any alphabet THEY DO NOT USE LETTERS .
I have yet to see any US or European SMS text device that can input Chinese , In fact the SMS [protocol is based on US ASCII character set is it not ?
To think that every Chinese person can read English or write any letters / alphabetic based language is naieve

Re:Shenanigans!

[Rorschach1]

No problem sending messages from Verizon in the US to China, either. Doesn't look like Verizon even overcharged me for it, which is really out of character for them.

Re:Shenanigans!

[francium de neobie]

Yeah, you do realize you're talking to a real, actual Chinese person in English?

You're wrong on so many levels.

First, there are many Chinese (even 1% out of 1.4 billion is still 14 million) who can perfectly talk and understand English. So, sending an English SMS message to them is perfectly fine.

Then, if the poor Chinese is confined to a phone with old styled 0-9*# keyboards, or QWERTY keyboards, he can type Chinese via input methods - basically he'll key in code sequences representing Chinese characters. If he switches the keyboard back to alphanumeric mode he can still type alphanumeric characters.

Finally, a Chinese with a iPhone and similar large touchscreen phones can just write Chinese characters on the screen. Again, typing alphanumeric characters can be accomplished by a simple mode switch.

Oh, and don't tell me Apple hasn't started selling iPhone in China yet. You can either buy that form Hong Kong (it's even unlocked out of the box), or from the black market.

Re:Shenanigans!

[IP_Troll]

A bit of snooping tells me that Vodafone is the only network from which it is possible to send SMS to a Chinese registered mobile phone.

WRONG - I have sent and received text messages from people in the PRC, I do not use Vodafone.

I'm curious why such a large section of the world market is cut off from the west's wireless communication networks especially with the recent Olympics putting the spotlight on the nation in general.

WRONG - It's not. Since when did SMS become "the west's wireless communication networks"? Try actually dialing the phone number and talking. Chances are the article writer's friend is merely leaving off the international dialing code, a common mistake. China isn't Europe, you need to dial more numbers.

It is interesting that when forced to choose between the idea of "clueless n00b" and "evil authoritarian" the slashdot crowd jumped on the unsubstantiated and ridiculous assertion that a trivial form of communication is blocked by China. SMS DOESN'T MEAN BUGGER.

What ever happened to the scientific method and empirical data? Where is some evidence to back this up other than a single anecdote? How did this tripe get on the front page?

Re:Shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

So the Majority of the Chinese population cannot communicate via SMS , only that small population that learn some cryptic code sequences to represent their character set ?

What we need is a re-make of SMS
It must support Chinese Characters directly as well as the languages of the world
SMS now seems outdated for international communication, without some pre- defined cryptic coding , How about SMS Unicode?

Re:Shenanigans!

[francium de neobie]

Most of the educated Chinese population is taught pinyin when they were school children, pinyin is an encoding method of Chinese characters in alphabets and number. So, as long as you have passed primary school in China, you should be able to type in Chinese characters with pinyin in fixed keyboard mobile phones.

If you want to say primary schools aren't that popular in the poorer areas in China, you can just look at the numerous primary schools collapsed in the recent Sichuan earthquake - Sichuan isn't a particularly rich area in China. Basic education is available in most rich and poor areas of China. Finding a primary school in the middle of deserts or high mountains isn't easy, still, but not many people live in those places. If there's a people problem with SMS in China, it would be the mostly illiterate people of the older generation - those who never had a chance to go to school when China was poor, and are not going to school now because they're already old. They can't even read Chinese characters, much less typing in the pinyin. But how are you going to help them if they don't want to go back to school?

Unicode would be nice, yes. We have two different character sets for Chinese characters here - big5 for Traditional Chinese and GB for Simplified Chinese. Pain in the ass if you received an SMS from a person in Hong Kong who uses big5 - the message appears garbled because your phone decodes it in GB. But we can still fallback to English in that case.

Re:Shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

I lived in Fuzhou, Fujian for the past few years and never had any of these troubles either. I used a pay as you go phone through China Mobile the entire time i was there. I was able to connect with family and friends in the U.S. and parts of Europe without any problems. SHENANIGANS!!!

Re:Shenanigans!

[moonbender]

Germany - China worked just fine, too. This whole story is just FUD.

Re:Shenanigans!

[afabbro]

Germany - China worked just fine, too. This whole story is just FUD.

Uh, no it's not. It's not Fear, it's not Uncertainty, and it's not Doubt. It's not designed to scare people away from a viable product. It's wrong and it's a dumb SlashDot story, but not everything that is dumb is FUD.

Re:Shenanigans!

[religious freak]

Agreed. I've sent texts to China (from USA) just fine. I was actually pleasantly surprised it worked, particularly because it was around the time of the massive earthquake they had a few months back.

I don't know what caused the poster to see what they saw, but Chinese government oppression was certainly not the cause in this case.

Re:Shenanigans!

[pipatron]

Yeah, you do realize you're talking to a real, actual Chinese person in English?

Stop it with your lies! The parent says that you can not communicate in English! Clearly you are! You must cease.

Re:Shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia has no problem with China Mobile either. I sent from China, and received from Australia many text messages, from various carriers. I would suggest that checking if international texts are enabled on your plan would be a good idea, Ainsy.

Re:Shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

How did this tripe get on the front page?

It's all explained on page three of the Official Slashdot Editorial Policy Manual.

Re:Shenanigans!

[Hanyin]

Alright I'll bite. Chinese use Chinese characters (called hanzi) when they sms each other, and while someone could use pinyin as pretty much all Chinese know it, it'd be pointless as it's generally easier to understand what they're saying with characters. The only incompatibility would be receiving Chinese characters on your foreign phone (they'd appear as squares and other unintelligible symbols) but depending on the make and model, I do believe that you can download and install the required programs onto your phone.

Conspiracy

[maxume]

I do believe it is a conspiracy by telecom companies not to spend money on something that they don't anticipate making a profit from.

Re:Conspiracy

[jason.sweet]

I am having a hard time thinking of a way to say this without sounding condescending, but I am afraid that I am going to fail.

Telephone companies, like most companies, are in business in order to make a profit. They may create products that you like and products that make your life easier, but the sole purpose for these products is to move the money from your pocket to theirs. In order to maximize profit, companies attempt to spend on things that produce a positive return on investment.

A "conspiracy" generally means someone is up to "no good" and trying to keep it a secret. Making a profit is sound business and not a secret, so there is no conspiracy here.

Re:Conspiracy

[maxume]

This may or may not sound condescending: Holy Fucking Whoosh.

Re:Conspiracy

[jason.sweet]

Now, that is funny.

Given the level of pseudo-socialist, whining-about-the-man rhetoric around here, it's difficult to know who to take seriously. Since your original post has been modded insightful, it appears I'm not the only one who took you seriously.

Re:Conspiracy

[maxume]

It could be mods missing the point, or it could be mods that are amused 'awarding' karma by using insightful, or it could be mods who got the underlying point and agreed.

I'm not sure I think any one of those is more likely than the others.

Canada to China SMS - OK

[omkhar]

Not an issue in Canada. Both Rogers (China Mobile and China Unicom) and Bell (China Mobile) support sending SMS to china

Souce

http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wireless-text/international_txt

http://www.bell.ca/shopping/en_CA_ON.info/VasInternationalTextMsg.details?tab=SPECS

Re:Canada to China SMS - OK

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just because we're a bunch of freedom hating commie lovers up here in Canada.

It's really hard to spread god-fearing democracy via SMS.

Re:Canada to China SMS - OK

[Anonymous Coward]

Friend sent me an SMS to a Chinese mobile from Germany, three years ago. So no problem there as well.

Comunism

[jprupp]

Did I just say comunism?, of course not Mr Officer, I said consumism, those westeners...

SMS Works for me

[phucan]

I haven't had any problems in the past sending and receiving text messages to my friends in Beijing and Shanghai. I'm on the Fido/Rogers network here in Canada. I'd test it out right now but it's 1 am in China.

I think that

[joeflies]

it's fairly amazing that international SMS works at all. Although it's a simple protocol, there are a lot of moving parts in between it would seem.

Re:I think that

[jimicus]

it's fairly amazing that international SMS works at all. Although it's a simple protocol, there are a lot of moving parts in between it would seem.

I'll tell you why international SMS (and, for that matter, international telephony in any form) works - both in terms of roaming and in terms of making calls to international numbers.

Money.

There is nothing intrinsic involved in roaming which costs a lot of money - it costs the operators fractions of a penny to support a single call or transmit a single message.

This is why roaming is so commonly available. The prices that are charged (both by the network you're roaming in to your own operator and by your operator to you) are so absurd and bear so little resemblance to the actual costs involved that it's basically a license to print money.

Chinese Government's Reply

[PPH]

Open communications and expresion is in China's future and always will be.

How

[Anonymous Coward]

This may be a dumb qustion but.
How does one send Chinese characters over SMS from the west with an alphabetic only keypad input ? China Unreachable by SMS yes but
  even if you could SMS to China, It seems foolish for a westerner to think that every Chinese can read Pin- Yin etc , it is stupid and insensitive as my Chinese neighbor says , even if we can SMS we need to use Unicode etc .
  Chinese has no alphabet and no way to input it on many western SMS devices , and i don't even know if SMS supports any characters sets other than ASCII English

Re:How

[francium de neobie]

If you buy a handset in China you'll get the same keyboard anyone in the west gets - it may be QWERTY, most of the time 0-9*#, and a writing pad if you got the iPhone 3G from Hong Kong.

iPhone's writing pad is obivous - you write Chinese characters with your hand on it, and switch back to the keyboard if you need to input alphanumeric characters. For the fixed keyboards you get something called "input methods" - basically you input a few keys according to some pattern (e.g. you type in the word's pinyin, or an encoded form of the character's structural description), and it will give you a menu of Chinese characters in a menu to choose from. Again, if you need to input alphanumeric characters, there's some key to switch back to alphanumeric mode.

because the CCCP doesn't want this:

[circletimessquare]

OMG army dudez machine gunnin college kids in tiananmen sq. pass it on bro BRB

Re:because the CCCP doesn't want this:

[mikiN]

D@L@1 1@M@ RULZ FT(W)

0M M@N1 P@DM3 HUN6

\|/
>*<
d^b

FREE TIBET

(No service)

What hole have you been living in?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello? Great Firewall of China? This seems like a no brainer.

Once Again, Slashdot Jumps to the Anti-China Line

[Anonymous Coward]

I am able to send SMS to china too.

Stop jumping to conclusions about China without facts.

Censorship in China is no more effective than "do not show to minors" warnings on porn. 1.3 billion people are not so easily firewalled.

anonymous mail is possible

[davidwr]

It's exactly like in the UK/US, where all companies involved in communication (phone, parcels/mail, tv, radio)

In the US it is legal to send mail up to 13 ounces without a return address. It is legal to send mail over 13 ounces without a return address but you have to hand-deliver it to a post office box and your face will typically be caught on camera. That's to prevent bombs and the like, not contraband information.

In the USA, it's also legal to use a pay phone or a prepaid phone call without revealing your identity. You will reveal your location, so make sure you call from a relatively populated place that is devoid of cameras.

For some, anonymity is a valuable commodity: Some people are willing to pay $10-$20 for a single phone conversation in exchange for anonymity - that's the approximate cost of a cheap prepaid cell phone with 10-20 minutes of talk time.

Re:anonymous mail is possible

[afabbro]

It is legal to send mail over 13 ounces without a return address but you have to hand-deliver it to a post office box and your face will typically be caught on camera. That's to prevent bombs and the like, not contraband information.

Well, that's the excuse. The reality is that it's to ensure full employment for thousands of members of the Letter Carriers' union. If it's illegal to send packages anywhere except at the post office, then you have to have people manning the windows...

Re:anonymous mail is possible

[level4]

In the USA, it's also legal to use a pay phone or a prepaid phone call without revealing your identity. You will reveal your location, so make sure you call from a relatively populated place that is devoid of cameras.

For some, anonymity is a valuable commodity: Some people are willing to pay $10-$20 for a single phone conversation in exchange for anonymity - that's the approximate cost of a cheap prepaid cell phone with 10-20 minutes of talk time.

No, you're buying an illusion of anonymity. With modern call log pattern analysis systems, intelligence services can determine your identity from your calling patterns, not the number from which you happen to make the call. The rough geographical location they get from the cell phone companies is just the icing on the cake. This kind of pattern matching is well suited to automation and it wouldn't surprise me one bit if every cell phone in every country with a decent intelligence service was subject to such analysis.

One would also expect pre-paid "anonymous" cellphones to be subject to additional "identity guessing" analysis since they are an obvious option for "anonymity" that the naive crook might take. With a bit of data sharing and international cooperation, I bet they can track people as they move around the world from cellphone to cellphone.

Basically, if there is any kind of pattern at all to your cell phone use - and there almost certainly is - cell phones are not "safe", no matter what. The same, of course, goes for people thinking that going to an internet cafe and thinking that their web browsing is somehow hidden. Fact is, if you log on at an internet cafe and then do the same 10 things you always do, that narrows the scope of your likely identity down like 6 orders of magnitude. Wow, thinks the computer, this session at this net cafe looks very similar to the guy at this home address. And boy, it's geographically pretty close. Likelihood: 85%. Save.

If someone is watching at the telecoms/ISP level, and you can be sure they are if you're in a UKUSA country, then your identity is likely derivable from patterns of usage, not the registered owner of that IP/number/whatever.

Sucks doesn't it. Anyway, it is possible to communicate anonymously, but it's a lot more work than just buying a prepaid. In fact you basically cannot use the phone system at all. You have to think a lot more like them, though, if you really want to escape the pattern matching dragnet.

On the bright side, SIGINT is pretty high level stuff. The intel agencies are not going to be giving away this kind of info to the police, who will just overuse it and kill the golden goose - at most they'd send a tip or two in politically important cases, I guess. One would hope that the top-level intel agencies are fairly responsible with the awesome data they have and you'd have to be a pretty bad guy for them to actually act on info from pattern matching surveillance.

Re:anonymous mail is possible

[cibyr]

One point does not a pattern make. GP was suggesting that someone buys a pre-paid phone and uses it for a single phone call. Good luck with your pattern analysis on that.

Re:anonymous mail is possible

[level4]

I don't really understand what you're saying. How could there only be *one* point of contact? I mean for starters - how would the caller know the person he was calling? He must know them from somewhere, he must have got the number from someone.

I suppose if you buy a prepaid cellphone and just dial a random number then that is indeed pretty anonymous and resistant to pattern matching, but I don't think that's what you're saying. Maybe be more specific and I'll try and pick holes in it / admit you've got a good point.

Re:anonymous mail is possible

[Anonymous Coward]

Do not forget, your voice patterns. range, etc can also be matched easily.

Re:anonymous mail is possible

[cibyr]

You know someone's number. You have never called this number from any phone traceable to you. You want to talk to this person. You buy a pre-paid cell phone, with cash. You go to a somewhat populated, but not CCTV-covered area. You disguise your voice (normal crappy cell-phone reception + compression will do a half-decent job of this for you), and you dial the number...

Re:anonymous mail is possible

[level4]

Well, yeah, I guess that would be untraceable.

But even so, I think there's elements you're not considering. For example, you hand-wave away that you somehow know their number. From who? Probably a known contact of that person. Probably someone a contact of that person called, or was called, in the last week. How many people is that? A hundred or two? That's already a massive narrowing of scope. Or did you talk to some guy in a bar? That is actually a good option and one reason that many criminals/people who don't want to be traceable own bars.

You also mention disguising your voice. Well, unless there is actual wiretapping going on, I don't think that is necessary - if the person is actually being tapped, you would have to be extremely careful. For example, if they've already started getting warrants for that kind of action (or acting like they don't need them ..) then you better have made sure your purchase at the phone shop wasn't caught on any CCTV or the clerk can't give a good description. However, I am not really talking about avoiding criminial investigations : )

And as far as I know ECHELON et al do not do voice recognition of that type. Could be wrong, of course.

But I do accept your point, which is that someone making these extreme efforts at not being traceable is, on balance, fairly "safe". However, I don't think the scenario you've described is common, because it's incredible inconvenient and doesn't scale very well. One phone per call? That's an awful lot of phones, an awful lot of phone purchases, and an awful lot of opportunities to get recorded on CCTV buying them. Shops will, of course, record the time of sale along with the number of the phone being sold.

Anyway, someone making these extreme efforts will be OK for a while, if they don't make any other mistakes. I wasn't really trying to say that there is absolutely no way to even temporarily avoid leaving an identifiable pattern in the phone system, only that it's hard not to, and that most people seem to be completely unaware that the capabilities to mine this data even exist.

Most people are unaware, for example, that while a warrant is required for the *contents* of your phone calls (or email) to be tapped (and these restrictions, while recently weakened, still present at least a hurdle), *header* information does not. Which number called which number, when and for how long - the logs, basically. The agencies do not need a warrant for that info and of course, they get it, probably in realtime.

People do not seem to understand the implications of that kind of data being available to the agencies and tend to concentrate on the content of the calls being the most important thing to protect. They don't realise that the header information is a fucking gold mine and with intelligent analysis you can get pretty much everything just from that. Ditto for email - and if you think S/MIME or PGP will protect you, think again. Headers, remember!

The intel agencies had this all figured out 20 years ago.

Re:anonymous mail is possible

[level4]

Could be, but now you're talking about a much more complex and "black" system. I'm just talking about the publically known capability, trying not to get into "inside knowledge" or speculative claims.

I, personally, do not think that voice recognition for ID purposes (as opposed to keyword purposes) is currently being run on a national all-inclusive scale. Maybe for international calls and on persons of interest but I can't see them doing it on all calls all the time. Firstly, it is illegal in most countries - that still might not stop them but it's at least a big nuisance, and they would probably have to do it offshore (hello UKUSA, again). Secondly, the scale of that project would be fucking insane. Even the transmission requirements boggle the mind, before you even consider storage and analysis! Thirdly, I don't think voice recognition for ID is quite there yet technically.

As for the keyword-triggered automated taping & transcription, I have no idea how far that goes, but my guess is "pretty far".

No way

[Anonymous Coward]

What? You want us to tell you a way to flood China, overrun its government and make the Oil Industry control the lives of 1 billion chinese people? No way dude. Figure it out your self.

Depends

[Life Liberty Freedom]

Can anyone tell me why this situation has come about and when we can expect this sort of service to be enabled?"

Depends, is slashdot available in China?

SMS is doing what?

[Paul Carver]

I may be at a disadvantage as a native English speaker, but what the heck does "upscaling massively" mean?

Is this some bizarrely twisted Babelfish translation of "becoming very popular"?

Re:SMS is doing what?

[Sockatume]

If by "babelfish" you mean "five-dollar word".

Re:SMS is doing what?

[corsendonk]

Hi, I am a chinese student studying english, let me please help you with my recently acquired command of the language. My conclusion is that they simply mean the following: Translate Server Error.
Glad i could help

Re:SMS is doing what?

[DaveV1.0]

Apparently, you have never played buzzword bingo.

Re:SMS is doing what?

[T.E.D.]

I may be at a disadvantage as a native English speaker, but what the heck does "upscaling massively" mean?

English translation: "getting bigger".

I'm suprised you haven't seen the term in some of your spam...

Those gymnasts were 016

[davidwr]

The Chinese use octal. They just love the number 8.

Re:Those gymnasts were 016

[rs79]

(Ok so I'm a pedant that did a bit of PDP-8 programming, they use octal).

The number "8" doesn't show up in octal. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12....

Re:Those gymnasts were 016

[Anonymous Coward]

If you love 8 it's a mistake to use Octal - Octal has no 8.

Re:Those gymnasts were 016

[Anonymous Coward]

(Ok so I'm a pedant that did a bit of PDP-8 programming, they use octal).

There's a strange character in your message, looks like a rotated infinity sign. I take it you mean PDP-10?

Re:Those gymnasts were 016

[Anonymous Coward]

Still doesn't make the GP incorrect. He just said they love the number eight. 7, in octal, is the eighth number in a base-8 numbering system. That's some pretty good 8-love.

Perhaps, to them, it would be blasphemous to represent the number 8 itself in written texts... aw hell, who am I trying to kid, here? Screw it, just ignore me.

5 words.

[Higaran]

GREAT FIRE WALL OF CHINA. Or maybe your friend is just on a government watch list over there and they aren't allowing him to get SMS's or he just has a really krappy phone plan.

Re:Spam? top spammers are:

[kubitus]

reality looks like this:

USA 1590

China 442

Russia 304

SouthKorea 201

UK 184

http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso

http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/spammers.lasso

no comment!

What's more surprising?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

That one person who has trouble sending SMS to China thinks that their story is newsworthy, or that the /. editors accepted it?

Re:What's more surprising?

[owlnation]

Absolutely... a total non-story. And quite typical of a UK citizen to think that because something happens there it happens everywhere. Britons need to get out more, then they might release how unique (and overpriced) their experience is for many things.

The editors accepting this is just part of the recent decrease in quality of /. Welcome to Diggocracy! Bring on the lolcats.

Re:What's more surprising?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

As a UK citizen who moved to the US, I agree that Britons all ought to live overseas for a bit to see that the world doesn't revolve around Britain. But I don't think that this story is a good example of why - this is someone who thinks the world revolves around the very spot they're standing on. (And as someone who watched the NBC coverage of the Olympics - it's not just the Brits who think that the world revolves around them.)

Re:What's more surprising?

[Knara]

The Universal HD (which is essentially NBC AFAIK) coverage of the Olympics was actually pretty good at being country non-specific. I mean, sure it scheduled stuff that had slightly more US contestants than everyone else, but I actually enjoyed watching a good number of events where USians weren't involved or not really in contention.

But, of course, the network TV and basic cable stations had basically all the "standard", LCD American interest events, which tend to be boring (to me at least). I really enjoyed watching the boxing events, even though the US team sucked this year and many of the bouts were clearly biased in favor of the home team (but I liked it anyway... go fig...). Also, the softball competition was interesting to watch.

Re:What's more surprising?

[Trojan35]

Slashdot has been streamlined and optimized based on user feedback and eliminated all articles from front-page news headlines.

This provides two unique benefits:
1) No one can copy articles in their entirety into posts.
2) No one can correct the summary and tell the editors to RTFA.

Re:What's more surprising?

[fermion]

Honestly, I think that the problem would be that there was no communication at all. This is another 'I have more money than I know what to do with and so my life is complicated issue'.

I recall not so long ago that there were time if I wanted to talk to certain people I had to walk down the street because these certain people did not even have a phone. Now we are so used to universal communication that if we can't text from the top of kilimanjaro we think there is a conspiracy afoot.

I live in an urban area, and I do so because I like the density of services. I, however, have spent enough time in rural areas and developing countries to know that the density of services are not universal.

Re:What's more surprising?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

I don't have cable or satellite and the local NBC coverage I saw was terrible. Dominated by just a handful of events like beach volleyball and swimming, not to mention the lame "feelgood" (and probably fictional) pieces on how athletes can be world class while being good parents. In 4 years I hope to watch some of the events in person, but in 8 years time I suppose I'll have to sign up for cable/satellite/superduperwirelessvideondemandofthefuture.

CCCP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where does the Soviet Union come into this?

plain n simple

[Anonymous Coward]

> Can anyone tell me why this situation has come about

cuz d gr8 fw of CN cn't detect d h8rz

Re:Once Again, Slashdot Jumps to the Anti-China Li

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, they're just cowed into obedience with the threat of being made into unpersons.

"/." Call Center.

[Anonymous Coward]

" Can anyone tell me why this situation has come about and when we can expect this sort of service to be enabled?"

Hi! You've reached Slashdot technical support. All of our representatives are busy helping other customers. So please listen to our crappy music selection until we can get to you. Thank you!

how to send a message to china...

[Anonymous Coward]

use MMS... im on o2 and frequently send messages to china :)
pictures also work, although ive not got a video through yet :(

Depends on your carrier's Inter-Carrier SMS vendor

[Alereon]

It would be cost-prohibitive for a phone company to maintain connections to every company they want to exchange SMS with. Instead, they select one of the several companies that maintain inter-carrier messaging networks to deliver this traffic for them. These companies include VeriSign, Syniverse, and Sybase 365. Which carriers you can exchange SMS with depends on which of these vendors your carrier has selected. In general, while they all have two-way reach to the major carriers internationally, each vendor has a different profile of smaller international carriers and countries in their portfolio.

Sorry, I'm getting a lot of static!

[PeanutButterBreath]

Maybe she is avoiding you?

Try Skype (well, the windows version)

[kroyd]

It works pretty well to send text messages to at least some Chinese mobile networks with Skype, but AFAIK the SMS option is not enabled in the Linux version yet. Of course, you can't receive any answers, and you have to be online to send, so it is not really a perfect alternative.

Exactly, but no mod points for me today!

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, but no mod points for me today!

Two questions, same answer

[prisoner-of-enigma]

Can anyone tell me why this situation has come about and when we can expect this sort of service to be enabled?

Answer to the first question: it's come about because the Chinese government hasn't figured out a way to control, filter, or monitor (or all three) SMS messages.

Answer to the second question: it'll be enabled when the Chinese government figures out an easy way to control, filter, or monitor (or all three) SMS messages.

Sometimes, the simple answers are the best ones.

2 much better questions

[catmistake]

SMS is expensive... and a gimmick. There are far better FREE mobile messinging techs out there, but it is still insanely popular.

1) Why do people still use SMS?
2) When will they stop, and stfu already?

Re:2 much better questions

[Free the Cowards]

So, I'm out in the middle of nowhere. My cell phone has a weak signal, enough to show up on the network but not enough to support an understandable conversation. I need to tell some people where I am. Instead of using SMS to give them my coordinates, I should _____________. (Please fill in the blank here.)

Re:2 much better questions

[Anonymous Coward]

lrn2 signal flares.

Re:2 much better questions

[raju1kabir]

1) Why do people still use SMS?
2) When will they stop, and stfu already?

We use it because it's built into the phone, it works with every phone no matter how old and crappy, it's supported pretty much everywhere, and the people we are communicating with already know how to use it.

I have been many places where there was simply no data service available via the cell networks (at least that I could come up with - let me know if you know how to get online in Syria using a prepaid SIM). But I've never been anywhere that SMS didn't work.

Re:2 much better questions

[jandrese]

Because you're in a noisy environment where it would be impossible to hold a regular phone conversation but need to send a message to a friend? Or you're in an environment where it would be rude to talk on your cell phone (subway/bus/airplane/etc...) but need to send a message.

Sure if you both have smartphones with data plans you can send an email or IM message instead, but most people have dumbphones with no real data plan, so SMS is really the only option. That's why providers can get away with charging an arm and a leg for it.

Re:2 much better questions

[nedlohs]

Yes, that's exactly why it is so popular.

Those billions of messages are from tens the hundred million people in the middle of nowhere.

Re:2 much better questions

[Free the Cowards]

Nice straw man there, did you build it yourself?

The person I responded to said, "There are far better FREE mobile messinging techs out there".

Well, I'm not aware of any free mobile messaging technology which is better than SMS in the particular aspect that I discussed. If there is one, I would really like to know about it.

Re:2 much better questions

[nedlohs]

Not a straw man at all, you just conveniently trimmed your quote.

"There are far better FREE mobile messinging techs out there, but it is still insanely popular." is the actual sentence used.

I still doubt it is "insanely popular" due to the use case you describe.

Re:2 much better questions

[Free the Cowards]

I "conveniently" trimmed my quote because that was the portion that I was responding to. I'm not saying that this is why it's insanely popular. I'm simply saying that there are ways in which SMS is simply the best service available. These supposedly better technologies are not, in fact, better in every way. The fact that SMS's key advantage has nothing to do with its popularity is irrelevant to what I'm saying.

Re:2 much better questions

[nedlohs]

So you were constructing the straw man then. Creating the situation which obviously is not being talked about - yes SMS is great in many contexts and makes perfect sense in those, but that has nothing to do with why it is so popular in other situations.

Note "in every way" also wasn't in the original post. You really have to try hard to interpret it as anything other than "why is SMS so popular for chatting?".

The cases in which SMS is in fact a great solution have nothing to do with it being popular.

Re:2 much better questions

[Free the Cowards]

I don't see it as a straw man at all. If you mean "far better for the common uses of SMS", you ought to say so.

The purpose of my post was two-fold. First was to point out why SMS can be very useful in ways that other things can't. Second was to find out if, in fact, there was some wonderful technology I didn't know about that was better than SMS even for this scenario.

Re:2 much better questions

[amorsen]

Why do people still use SMS?

Because it works. Everything else requires both parties to agree on a protocol. SMS is there all the time.

Also, domestic SMS's tend to be cheap. International ones are a rip-off.

works fine

[Anonymous Coward]

My gf lives there and we txt everyday with no problem. US T-mobile to China mobile.

Uh, can you say.....

[PontifexMaximus]

COMMUNIST country? Damn, what kind of silly question is that? Seriously, where have you been hiding the last 60 years or so? It's not like Telecoms are overlooking China as much as China is banning them from doing any business there.

Granted, the reins are loosening and pretty soon, China will be about as communist as my cat, but do we really need dipshit questions like this on /.?

Completely? Really?

[Sockatume]

You can argue that there's excessive governmental interference in media and communications in the UK and/or US, but it's beyond hyperbole to suggest that "all companies involved in communication (phone, parcels/mail, tv, radio) are controlled completely by their governments", especially when the BBC of all things has explicitly stated protections from government interference in its activities.

It's not just China

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

I can speak and read Russian reasonably well and I have a few friends who live in Ukraine and Russia. I live in the USA. I can send SMS to any of my friends in Ukraine, but only some of them can send SMS back to me. I don't remember which one, but one of the two biggest mobile phone companies in Ukraine simply does not allow their customers to send SMS to the USA. The other one does allow it. Again, incoming SMS is no problem.

In Russia, I have a friend with the opposite problem. She can send SMS to me with no problem, but I cannot send SMS to her. Basically T-Mobile (my provider) says that her company (Megafon) has problems accepting SMS from T-Mobile and they (Megafon) aren't interested in fixing it. T-Mobile says it is an issue Megafon has to fix. So the only way that I could send SMS to my friend was to use Megafon's website which allows you to send SMS via the web to their customers.

Note that this has all been true for years and has nothing to do with the Georgia-Russia situation. Ukraine has excellent relations with the USA and nobody knows why one of their major mobile phone providers refuses to allow its customers to send SMS to the USA while the other one has no such restrictions, but that's how it is. A wise man once said "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity" or something like that.

Re:It's not just China

[Anonymous Coward]

I had an identical problem between Poland (Orange) and Aruba (unknown). While in Poland I could receive an SMS but couldn't reply.

no problems here

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no problem texting people in hong kong using sim cards purchased there from a phone with a uk sim card.

UK 2 China = MMS

[FeX79]

im on O2 in the UK, and i can send messages to china using MMS... pictures also work, although video doesnt seem to :( images that are sent/recieved are scaled down to a stupidly small size, so dont expect anything high quality to come through.. but it does work :) im not sure of the russian carrier, but i have also sent plain sms to st petersburg

It is reachable...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no problem sending SMS to a Chinese friend of mine, after he contacted his cell phone plan provider to enable the feature.

Can't censor SMS messages

[rtechie]

A number of posters have already responded to this.

Contrary to what some people will tell you, SMS messages are safe. They are not cached or stored anywhere. I happen to know that the BILLING for SMS messages eats up an order of magnitude more bandwidth and storage space than the messages themselves. The companies that do SMS billing run on a shoestring and can just barely handle the billing capacity. They aren't even CONSIDERING any eavesdropping because doing so would require massive SMS caches that they aren't about to pay for. Wiretapping requirements would drive them out of business overnight, so you can expect them to fight it tooth and nail. In fact, the telcos are already trying to preempt this by having US SMS messages billed by Euro companies and Euro SMS messages billed by US companies to make it harder for intelligence agencies to determine who to go after.

In other words, it looks like if a law is passed requiring them to monitor SMS they'll probably just ignore it. Telecom immunity, remember? People seem to forget this applies to FUTURE crimes and is very broad. Including allowing telecoms to ignore eavesdropping requirements on new services, which is one of the big reasons they wanted the immunity. They want the power to say to the government "You want us to install new wiretapping gear? Fine, pay us big pile of money otherwise we aren't doing dick."

Re:Can't censor SMS messages

[DaveV1.0]

Yeah, are you sure about that? Which inter-carrier service do you work for?

I ask because I know that many services use store and forward, that most SMS and MMS services use SMTP to transfer messages, that the ICS I work for does a lot of billing for all their customers.

So, please, tell us which ICS you work for, because I would be really interested to know.

Re:Can't censor SMS messages

[rtechie]

I ask because I know that many services use store and forward, that most SMS and MMS services use SMTP to transfer messages, that the ICS I work for does a lot of billing for all their customers.

Who do YOU work for? I assume you're not saying for the same reason I'm not. I worked for two ICS companies as a contractor. I built databases and did infrastructure so I don't know the nitty-gritty of how they transferred messages around. What I do know is what I said, the bandwidth for the billing greatly exceeded the bandwidth for the actual text messages and they had nowhere near the storage capacity necessary to cache SMS (MMS wasn't very big back then) messages for any length of time. "Store and forward" maybe, but store for 5 minutes. At best.

Re:Can't censor SMS messages

[rtechie]

I think they might also have been doing billing for ringtones and crap like that which is why the billing bandwith was so high. Even so, just looking at the traffic it seemed like the billing for SMS ate up more than SMS itself. This has probably changed with more bulk plans.

Re:Can't censor SMS messages

[DaveV1.0]

I work for one of the Big Three. And, I do production support for text messaging, so I am involved in the nitty-gritty of how messages are transferred.

Re:Spam? top spammers are:

[Anonymous Coward]

Who do you think is controlling the machines in the USA sending that spam?

What else is new?

[Anonymous Coward]

What part of "chink" do you not understand?

US T-mobile works

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife texts (SMS) her family in China all the time. My wife uses T-mobile in the US. Her family uses China Mobile, some pre paid, others not.

Re:US T-mobile works

[monktus]

You'll notice that the user above posted anonymously. If he'd logged in then thousands of Slashdotters would be on his case trying to find out which website he ordered his hot Asian wife from.

It is the user and not China's networks

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been living and working in the following area's of China for the past six months: Shenzhen where I have a China Mobile pay-as-you go number, Shanghai where I have a registered China Mobile sim, and I've sent text messages using my Verizon phone over China Unicom's network. I've never had a problem sending text messages to the U.S., U.K. or anywhere else for that matter AS LONG AS I use the full and correct country/area code/number format. ID 10 T

1 RMB is too expensive

[OrangeTide]

1 RMB for an SMS is still too expensive, when you consider that it costs nearly nothing to send an SMS.

Re:1 RMB is too expensive

[pythonist]

That's not for one SMS but one month's limited service.

Why China Doesn't SMS

[EunuchsAddMen]

Might the problem lie in the fact that it's probably much more difficult to text in Mandarin than in a language with a phonetic alphabet like English? I don't know how phones in China deal with their written language, but I've seen keyboards with Chinese characters on them, and they looked a bit busy to say the least. A cell phone with the normal number of buttons might be an infeasible way to enter text.

Re:Why China Doesn't SMS

[raju1kabir]

Chinese SMS messages are entered with pinyin (at least on my phone). You type on the roman-alphabet keyboard and get Chinese characters. For example, type 'bei' and then it shows you all the different characters that match, and you scroll to select one. A bit more tedious than typing in a European language but my Chinese friends seem to zip right along.

My phone also seems to support a stroke-based method of entering Chinese characters but I have no idea how that works. I've only ever seen people using the pinyin method.

Love 8 or hate 8

[evansomd.com]

Very funny, but illogical. If they love the digit 8, they picked the wrong radix, as they can't use "8" with the octal radix. They either love the number 010 (7+1), or they hate 8 and 9 :)

One possible reason

[pythonist]

Service charge can be a factor. Receiving messages is free in China but receivers get (ridiculously) charged in states. Carriers failed to make agreement at this point.

What's it like living in 1986?

[Dogtanian]

COMMUNIST country? Damn, what kind of silly question is that? Seriously, where have you been hiding the last 60 years or so?

China isn't a communist country in anything but name and hasn't been for a long time. Where have *you* been hiding the last 20 years?

China is- in many respects- less socialist, let alone communist, than the United States in areas such as education and healthcare. A far more accurate description would be (as someone else said) "the world's first mature fascist economy".

That's fascism as in blending the interests of the state and commerce to serve each other, exploiting nationalism, etc. etc.

Granted, the reins are loosening

And the Soviet Union is showing signs of opening up. Uh, the reins started "loosening" in the financial sense during the 1980s, they are long gone.

China will be about as communist as my cat

China is already about as communist as your cat. (Unless your cat's name is "Chairman Miaow", ho ho ho!)

but do we really need dipshit questions like this on /.?

It's only a "dipshit" question if you're enough of a dipshit to believe that China is still communist. Either because you're living in the past, because you're ignorant, or because you engage in the usual kneejerk reaction that communism and dictatorship are synonymous and that capitalism always implies freedom. China isn't remotely free, but it sure as hell isn't communist either.

Personally, I'm happy to believe that (as others have suggested) this has as much to do with the large Chinese telcos' control of the market as anything.

Works fine between T-Mobile USA and China Mobile

[shuying]

China Mobile charges 1 RMB ($0.15) per international SMS. The article is simply over-generalizing and the talk about censorship is laughable.

Same from .NL and .ES

[InterBigs]

Same here.. I have no problem SMSing my brother on his chinese cellphone from my Dutch Orange subscription. I know he has no problem receiving messages from my parents spanish Mobistar phones either. Unfortunately I don't know what telco he's with, but I do believe it's a prepaid account as he's ony there temporarily.

USA to China SMS messages

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a joke. T-Mobile USA has no issues sending SMS to China. Even the prepaid has one of the most competitive rates. AT&T Wireless (Mobility) charges $9.95 to send 100 international text messages, which send to China (China Mobile) without fail. China is one of a small number of countries to treat mobiles the same as fixed lines, and calling rates are very reasonable.

Mutual agreement

[Roger W Moore]

Blaming "the rest of the world" is idiotic.

I'm not convinced: I think it is by mutual arrangement. The Chinese government do not want outsiders informing the Chinese what their government is up to and the Western phone companies don't want the Chinese to inform their subscribers what they are up to: fleecing their subscribers for all they can with things like massively inflated SMS prices.

SMS Costs Providers NOTHING! NO A F!$%^#$G DIME

[Anonymous Coward]

Text messages are sent and received within an out of band 'packet' sent from your phone many times a second, when you phone is polling the tower for new calls. So in essence, it doesn't cost them a thing. I can't remember where I read it, but it was someone's comment on slashdot.

They like 8 a lot

[davidwr]

To them it is a perfect 010.

OMFG c3nz0rZ!

[6Yankee]

Exactly. I have two friends in the US. One, I can send SMS to her but she can't send back. The other, we can send SMS both ways but MMS only works from her to me - on my old phone with a different network, MMS also worked both ways. Now, is it the UK or the US that has this repressive Great Firewall? I forget. I'm quite sure that this has more to do with differing roaming agreements between operators than with some sinister tinfoil-hat plot to crush teh t3xtz0rz. Some people on here really need to grow up. The OP would do better to ask their mobile operator than Slashdot.

I send SMS all the time

[tdknox]

Currently I live in the USA and my fiancee lives in Beijing. In the USA I have Verizon Wireless as my cell phone provider, and I'm not sure what company my fiancee uses in Beijing (her cell phone starts with 86 13).

I have no problems sending or receiving SMS messages with her at all hours of the day and night. She has never failed to receive an SMS text from me, nor I her.

I have seen no evidence that there is a problem sending or receiving SMS to China.

Tom

Re:I send SMS all the time

[DaveV1.0]

Your welcome. The company I work for makes your VZW to China carriers SMS and MMS possible.

Re:I send SMS all the time

[John Sokol]

I have also do no have any problems using Verizon Wireless to send text message into and out of Main Land China, the city is Shen Zhen specifically.

Skype also work excellent for voice and text messages to and from China.

I don't think there is really any problem just some phone carriers here and maybe over there just don't have there act together.

You're asking why....

[Anonymous Coward]

A country that ignores civil liberties of human beings doesn't want them talking to the rest of the civilized world?

This is a country (China) that denies historical events that make them look bad (Tiennamen Square) not only that but they filter any references to said historical events online!

Thats like asking the guy who just slapped you in the face why he got dirt on your sneakers.

PINYIN!

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of pinyin? That's one of _the_ ways of typing phonetic chinese using the ASCII character set. Widely used in forums, MSN etc.

doh!

[OrangeTide]

Good point. In the US you have to charge more than that for a month's service because the paperwork for a service item probably costs more than 15 cents (~1 RMB).

Re:doh!

[pythonist]

Subscribing to services goes paperless in China. Simply send a message to a given number and it's all done. Paperless billing and banking is part of people's daily life with help of SMS. Text messaging is even a popular way to vote, not for politics but for American Idol like show.

Works fine

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? I exchange text message with mobiles in China all the time. My girlfriend (and now wife) and I used to exchange more than 5000 messages a month.

Occam's razor says that it's not censorship....

[gadget junkie]

.....It's Economics: as the original poster says,

SMS in China is upscaling massively, and is incredibly cheap currently â" even 'premium' SMS info services cost 1 Yuan (that's just £0.081 GBP).

it might be that there's no revenue sharing pact between local phone companies and the foreign mobile companies regarding text messages.

No problem with SMSbetween France and China

[untelp]

I just come back from one year in China and exchanged SMS with French located mobile phones (between China Mobile and SFR or Orange) - all was ok except that you cannot see hanzi if your Nokia was bought in France.

I can send SMS from US to China just fine

[irotsoma]

My fiance is a Chinese citizen and has been in China for about 10 months now waiting for her Visa so that we can get married (the US doesn't allow a visitor Visa while waiting for an immigration Visa). Anyway, I have AT&T and have never had a problem sending her text messages from the US. I was even able to make calls and send SMS inside China to my friends and family in the US when I visited China to see her. So I don't think it's China's fault. It is probably just that most carriers don't have the connections required because it's not cost effective since most customers probably don't use it.

People seem to want to make China look bad and post some of the opinions here without understanding the true issues. I agree that China is very controlling, but we shouldn't be so quick to blame them for every bit of data that doesn't reach it's destination. The government doesn't have control over everything. Has anyone actually done any research before posting their comments here to find out the real reasons? I think you'd find they were much less malicious than some of you think.

Verizon can go through..

[Anonymous Coward]

Verizon phones can get through. They list on their website they can SMS to both China Mobile and China Unicom. In addition, China Unicom is CDMA, so in theory if I took my phone to China, I could get and send SMS while roaming in China too.

I have been looking into this for a while...

[wheaty73]

I have done quite a bit of research into sending and receiving SMS to/from China in the past couple of years, partly because I lived out there until recently and mainly because needed to keep in contact with people in the UK, and now the reverse is true (so I can keep in touch with people there). As has been said in other replies this isn't down to censorship as some suggest but to do with peering agreements between networks. There are 2 major Chinese mobile networks - China Mobile (CM) and China Unicom (CU) - although this is changing soon or may have already. CU has a majority CDMA network, with a small (crappy reception) GSM network. CM is mainly GSM. The Chinese mobile needs to have international SMS / Calling enabled on their contract. This sounds obvious but is easily overlooked! I have tested with the following UK networks - O2, Voda (business contract) and Orange. Sending from China to UK CM > O2 CM > Voda CM > Orange all messages send from China, arrive in UK fairly soon after. CU > O2 CU > Orange all messages send and receive as above CU > Voda Couldn't get messages to arrive. Now, from the UK > China, things were a lot simpler. Orange > CU Orange > CM Voda > CM Messages send and are received. O2 > CU, CM Voda > CU No messages are received but report sent. I have contacted both the latter networks, and although they have roaming agreements with both Chinese networks (to allow voice calls on users travelling in the others region) they don't with SMS, so they can't guarantee a message sent will arrive (so they don't). Voda told me they have no plans for this (odd, since it sent fine to CM), O2 said they were trying to reach agreements in time for the Olympics (which after a quick test now they haven't managed). So in my experience, Orange in the UK and CM in China are the way to go. Orange actually have a PAYG tariff called "Camel" now which gives ridiculously cheap SMS and voice to China so it actually works out cheaper for me anyway. Hope that is useful!

Not the only case.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not the only case.

I have trouble sending SMS messages from Alltel phone to countries in old Yugoslavia (e.g. Croatia or Slovenia for example).

Chinese mobiles

[Anonymous Coward]

i live in china and i can recieve sms without any problem from every net.

The problem is that in every city/province in china the mobilefees are different and even the mobile "Features". If u buy a SIM in shanghai u can call cheap there but IF u go in another city then u are pretty fucked because the fees are MUCH more expensive

(in my city 1 min cost about 0.3 yuan from mobil to mobil, if i go in another city i have to pay 3,5 yuan per minute)

There is much to complain about china but the mobiles they manage very well.

Not only China - how about the United States

[GayBliss]

I live in Spain and can't send or receive SMS messages to my friends in the United States. I have used both Orange and Movistar, and neither one of them have agreements with all the major US carriers for SMS. They work with some carriers, but sometimes only one direction (I can send SMS to T-Mobile, but not receive from them). I called Movistar (Spain) and was told they only work with AT&T in the US, and AT&T does indeed appear to be the only one that works in both directions. I have no problems sending or receiving to anyone in Europe.

Now we send email to and from our mobile phones and it turns out to be cheaper than SMS and with fewer limitations. We just don't get the immediate notification.

there is no 8...

[Anonymous Coward]

... in octal!

No problems

[able1234au]

I travel to china all the time and i have no problems. i have people working for me in china who SMS me. But i am on vodafone. Still, no one has mentioned it to me as an issue.

Re:Spam? top spammers are:

[pipatron]

Americans. Who do you think?

Heh, no, I'm kidding of course. It must be the evil communazis.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

not really the case...

[Anonymous Coward]

I send and receive about 5 text messages to and from China every day from the UK with absolutely no problems at all. I use orange pay as you go and the recipients all use China mobile.

Your friend is probably using xiaolingtong, or some other equally rubbish mobile phone network. Tell her to get a china mobile sim and she shouldn't have any problems.

China doesn't seem to me to be purposefully cutting off sms traffic from teh west - some of the major networks even offer packages which make sending/receiving texts from other countries considerably cheaper.

Hold the phone:

[Anonymous Coward]

I live and work in mainland China at least 100 days each year. I have phones with both China MObile and China Unicom. I use and depend on SMS service with the rest of the world for work and staying in touch with home. Both phone sevices work flawlessly to message home. In fact, calls from China or SMS can be routed through the internet using a variety of services by dialing an extra 5 digits prior to the international access code. A typical thirty minute call to my wife costs from Guangzhou China, to San Diego, CA costs around 17 cents US. My young Chinese co-workers all carry much better cell phones than I do, and like the young people here, are far more adept at the technology than I am.

Sorry, but I have to disagree with the opinion posted. I've been doing this for ten years.

SMS is a rip

[The Cisco Kid]

If the phone isnt a total piece of shit, and the service isnt crap, then it has at the very least a POP email client, and enough Internet access to use it.

Email is free - why the hell would anyone who isnt a clueless teenager whos parents are paying the bill or a complete ignoramus pay 20cents per 120-character message to use SMS?

Re:Why would we want to talk to the Chinese?

[Anonymous Coward]

Give me a break! It's "just" an animal.
Now you either oppose eating animals at all, because you think you're past the point where we need to kill lifeforms,
or you think that in nature, lifeforms eat each other and it's an evolutionary struggle, in that we just happen to win all the time,

but you can't eat life and oppose others eating other life, just because it's "more cute" (however you define that).

Hmm... why am I answering a (anonymous) coward again?
Oh well... ;)

not PAPERwork, but paperWORK

[OrangeTide]

I didn't mean literally paperwork. I mean the process of administering it. my cell phone bell has been web-based for a good 6 years now. I can get information on my account via SMS here in the US, but I can't actually pay or transfer money with SMS. (but I can with a decent web-enabled phone)

Texting in Mandarin...

[pdxdan0]

So the "west" is going to send text messages to China. Two very scary words... "predictive Mandarin..."

Not only in China...

[andyteleco]

I live in Spain and my girlfriend is in USA. I've tried to send SMSs to her cellphone (yes, it's GSM!) from different spanish operators and she won't receive them. However, I was still billed by my company and when I called them they told me it was all a question of agreements between the different companies, and that it's up to the user to make sure these agreements exist before sending the text message.

Really Nonsense

[justice83]

Nonsense, I'm in the UK and I text my girlfriend on a day to day basis. I've use o2, Vodafone and Orange. And all messages have sent/received as expected. When I say as expected, I think I need to clarify something. Basically even if you are in China, using Chinese SIM cards, there is about a 95% to 98% chance that text message will actually be completely delivered, if at all. When you are in different cities within China this percentatage probability is reduced by about 5% to 15% percent. I'm not saying directly this is 'crap', in fact most Chinese prefer to text rather than talk. Texts are so cheap they are almost free in China. When you are travelling, say on the train, I'm always amazed how I still get 100% reception, and I'm about 500 miles away from any kinda city. I've never seen my phone drop one bar on the reception monitor during my 1 year stay (personally I worry about just how many microwaves are going through my brain, 100% of the time, at 100% power)! Just fields and the odd farm for 5 hours on the go, and still a call is crystal clear (This is impossible in the UK while on the train, and I'm just 5 miles away from a big city)! However, while on the move try sending a text, then turn your mobile off for an hour or two, turn it back on. There's about a 1%-10% chance you'll get the queued reply message from your friend. Well, I guess its probably is easier to monitor text messages than voice, hence messages do get lost, often. I'd say this has nothing to do with if you are sending from another country, its just how texts are treated in China. In summary, whether in China or not, if you want to get important stuff through, pick up the phone and speak. Hope this is insightful... ~Danny.

Those wily Chineses!!!!!!

[kklein]

I live in Japan.

I can't get SMS from people who aren't on the same carrier, let alone in another country.

In fact, I was really surprised recently to find out that anyone could SMS people in other countries (I knew the same-carrier business was just Japan).

This has absolutely nothing to do with "West" vs. "East." It's different companies deciding what services to offer or not. Sheesh.

Rarely above £0.05 GBP

[sepelester]

In Sweden, we rarely pay more than £0.05 GBP (US $0.10) for an SMS, I thought China would be WAY cheaper than that. Also, I recently discovered that a phone call from Sweden to the United States, UK, Australia, Germany etc, is cheaper than a domestic phone call by a factor of two with my service provider. China is one of the few countries that are more expensive than local swedish calls. (Cuba is the only other country I know of)

Never mind China, no service in Vermont either

[SAABMaven]

...but that's because the Vermont legislators, in their wisdom, hand out monopolies and subsidies like there's no tomorrow. Consider IBM, which enjoys almost-free electrical power in my state, cheap land and no taxes on that land.

Nearby IBM roads are blacktopped yearly at public expense whilst roads elsewhere in the state have been washed out in the Summer storms, bridges are gone and the repairs are not proceeding for lack of public funds. For technology work, I have to commute outside of Vermont.

I live in Vermont and run a home office; fortunately twisted pair still work. Speaking of twisted pair, our legislators handed a telephone monopoly to Fairpoint Communications. (over public outcry) Fairpoint are the only company that can get away with erecting billboards in Vermont. You tell me how!

No problems from Australia

[Anonymous Coward]

I've sent and received plenty of SMS to and from China from Australia. Locally I've used both Optus and 3. Not sure what the carriers were on the Chinese side.

Perhaps the problem is with the free and open US of A - where the government never intercepts your communications without a warrant.

sms championship

[palam4ik]

I've heard China has a sms Championship +)

RottenNeighbor not availlable from German ISPs

[Anonymous Coward]

So what?
http://www.golem.de/0809/62185.html

UK Orange network is fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've sent many SMSs, and made phone calls, to my friend in China on a UK Orange contract...

Don't see the problem.

I don't have any problems with sms to China

[__aahahe6747]

I've been regularly exchanging sms messages with a couple of friends in China for about 3 years. Also, I have very few problems making phone calls to China via mobile or land line. :-\ I'm in Australia and use the Optus mobile network and a Telstra land line. A friend of mine also communicates with people in China, he uses both the Telstra and Vodafone mobile networks.