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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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]

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.

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?

[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.

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

[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.

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.

Censorship

[gsslay]

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

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]

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!

[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!

[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!

[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.

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.

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

Chinese Government's Reply

[PPH]

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

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

[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.

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"?

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: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?

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.

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: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.

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

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!

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.