Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
www.GrenadeHop.com
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.
to my knowledge no mobile phone provider passes SMS from Austria to China. ( which would ease the time difference for communication )
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.
Wow. Don't follow international politics much, do you?
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?
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
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...
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.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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
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.
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.
Open communications and expresion is in China's future and always will be.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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?
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"?
The Chinese use octal. They just love the number 8.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
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!
That one person who has trouble sending SMS to China thinks that their story is newsworthy, or that the /. editors accepted it?
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
> Can anyone tell me why this situation has come about
cuz d gr8 fw of CN cn't detect d h8rz
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.
Maybe she is avoiding you?
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.
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.
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.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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 /.?
Pax Vobiscum
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.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
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.)
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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
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."
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0M M@N1 P@DM3 HUN6
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1 RMB for an SMS is still too expensive, when you consider that it costs nearly nothing to send an SMS.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
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.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
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 :)
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.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
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.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
China Mobile charges 1 RMB ($0.15) per international SMS. The article is simply over-generalizing and the talk about censorship is laughable.
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.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel."
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.
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.
To them it is a perfect 010.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
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
Did you know that gullible is not in the dictionary?
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).
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
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.
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.
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.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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.
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.
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.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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!
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.
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.
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.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
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.
Americans. Who do you think?
Heh, no, I'm kidding of course. It must be the evil communazis.
c++;
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
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)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So the "west" is going to send text messages to China. Two very scary words... "predictive Mandarin..."
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.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
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.
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.
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.
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)
...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!
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.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I've heard China has a sms Championship +)
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.