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

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!

[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.

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

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.

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?

[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?

[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.