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China Practically Unreachable By Western SMS?

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the can-you-read-me-now dept.

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?"

4 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Shenanigans! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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...

  2. Canada to China SMS - OK by omkhar · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  3. Depends on your carrier's Inter-Carrier SMS vendor by Alereon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. Re:Is this for real? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.