Do international mobile roaming fees annoy you? Well since 1973 China has had roaming fees within its own borders, and yesterday authorities announced they are finally getting rid of them.
For decades mobile phone users in China have had to pay more if they are using their phone outside the province where it is registered. For example, calls on a phone registered in Shanghai will have a normal rate of 0.5yuan/min, but go on a trip to Beijing and that rate will increase to 1.1yuan/min. The fees were originally in place because of technological limits on phone calls going between provinces, but were also an understandable annoyance for travellers and business-people.
Service fees have steadily decreased since they were first introduced, but The Ministry of Information Industry has announced that on October 1 2017 mobile phone roaming fees will be scrapped for good. The new policy applies to all three of China’s mobile carriers: China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom.
As demand on services such as calls and SMS has dropped with ever-growing WiFi coverage, the government has been pressured to drop any extra service fees. Is this a formal gesture to disguise inflation on mobile charges? Does it mean reaching deeper into our pockets to pay for 4G data and other derivative services? We’ll soon find out.
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