The dramatic earthquake in Sichuan has revealed the incredible resilience of Chinese telecommunication operators. China’s telecom industry as a whole had dispatched 15,000 staff, 520 satellite phones and 650 sets of emergency telecommunication equipment. While China Telecom was working hard on restoring its fiber optics network, China Unicom launched satellite communication services in the region. China Mobile set up three temporary mobile communication base stations at the rescue command center. China Mobile’s Sichuan branch also opened sites in areas with dense populations in Sichuan Province so that people affected by the earthquake can keep in touch with their families and friends around the nation. By May 14, it had set up more than 2100 such sites to provide free telephone service, free mobile phone battery charging and free drinking water.

Analysts estimate that operators might have to spend as much as USD 200 million to reconstruct or replace up to 2,600 base stations which may have been destroyed or badly damaged by the earthquake. The use of alternative communication technologies  also highlighted the importance of redundancy. Xiaolingtong phones (aka “little smart”) are being extensively used in place of the mobile phones. China Satellite Communications Corporation is importing 1,000 satellite phones amid efforts to support the disaster areas in addition to the 350 satellite phones alrady dispatched to rescue personnel.

P.S.: The crisis has also prompted most players in the sector to donate either equipment or cash.

According to the BBC, overseas hackers have been disrupting Chinese websites for the past month. At stake in this online battle? The independence of Tibet and other politically sensible topics that have brought China to the center of media attention.

One the latest targets of the cyber-attacks has been ”Red Heart”, a website movement in which 7 million Chinese MSN users added a patriotic red heart to their usernames. The hackers posted the Tibet independence flag on 5sai.com, the site that initiated the movement. The hacking also came with the usual ”denial of service” (DoS). The attackers’ IP addresses were in some cases attributed to Europe - although one should keep in mind that it is notoriously difficult to determine with a high level of precision who is behind a cyber-attack. As the Olympics come closer and tension does not seem to decrease it looks like, for once, it is time to look West.

Spontaneous patriotic campaigns by Internet users are not unheard of, even in China. The (mistaken?) bombing of the Belgrade embassy by the US air force had prompted a number of serious hackings of american governmental websites - including the homepage of the U.S. embassy in Beijing and U.S. Department of Interior. It is however one of the first large-scale hacktivist movement against Chinese sites. It looks like the Games have already started on the Internet.

Will widgets (software applications) allow the emergence of truly global mobile operators? Last week Vodafone and China Mobile (600 million subscribers together) joined with Softbank to launch the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL). Their focus is on improving mobile’s user interface, and in particular enable different widgets and applications to run smoothly on different handset platforms and operating systems across different mobile operators.

Behind JIL’s widgets project something more profound is taking place. Remember that the world’s two largest mobile phone operators entered into a strategic alliance in 2000 (sealed by Vodafone’s USD 2.5 billion acquisition of 2% of China Mobile). They have been collaborating on a number of projects over the years - more recently they jointly backed LTE, preparing the ground for 4G. At stake this time is no less than the development of a universal software specification.

So is this the signal that the two operators are finally coming out of the woods and prepared to use their huge subscriber base to drive the future of the mobile industry? For sure, cooperation will be useful to speed the roll-out of mobile internet services. It will also allow them to better face the upcoming battle with Google and Yahoo  - who are also keen to occupy the mobile space. It is also interesting for China Mobile - and China in general - since it will be one of the first attempt to approach standardization in a bottom-up fashion - from the market - rather than top-down - from the government. We may be witnessing China Mobile’s first steps into becoming a global mobile operator…

Please meet CCSA - China Communications Standards Association - one of the hyper-active Chinese governmental agency in charge of flooding the world of telecommunication with home-made standards. Not long ago it came up with an “earphone access” standard and an “interface data exchange” standard to regulate mobile phone data and transmission. Look out for green and yellow UDX labels (Universal Data Exchange)…

This time CCSA is shifting its focus from traditional telecom services to Internet-related convergent services. Together with major telecommunication operators, the agency is looking into providing convergent communication services through platforms and solutions offered by global suppliers like Cisco, Microsoft, Huawei or ZTE. The move indirectly acknowledges that some domestic companies have reached the technological capacity and maturity of leading international companies. Also, it doesn’t try the usual trick of competing heads on with existing standards - rather it attempts to bring together diverse technologies.

But don’t worry. CCSA has not completely given up on its more traditional business: it will soon issue a series of standards on energy efficiency and environmental protection for the telecom equipment manufacturing and telecom service industries.

Wasn’t the introduction of TD-SCDMA (the Chinese 3G standard) in 2008 supposed to mark China’s technological coming out? Not quite, at least that’s what two weeks of commercial trial seem to indicate.

Complaints about signal standards, restricted coverage and a general lack of content are comforting the eternal doubters of China’s capacity to successfully roll out its own third-generation (3G) service. There is even a kind of Schadenfreude among the watchers of the country’s technological efforts: “I told you so”, “TD-SCDMA was a disaster waiting to happen”…

For sure, TD-SCDMA’s agenda remained dictated by the government, rather than by consumers. The overall drive may also have lacked the necessary back-and-forth between the labs and the market to improve the technology and build on valuable consumer feedback. So, the withholding of 3G network licenses not only results in the non-deployment of more mature CDMA2000 or W-CDMA 3G networks in time for the Olympics. China also lost a chance to prove the openness of its markets and make good on its WTO committment to technological neutrality. Worse of all, the country may be sending techno-nationalistic signals without an ability to really deliver anything commercially viable behind.

Let’s hope that the failed launch of 3G can serve as an example for the deployment of 4G!

Chinese telecommunication operators are continuing on their green track. At a recent eco-friendly conference, China Mobile announced that it aims to reduce its electricity consumption by 40% in 2010 (from 2005). 73% of CM’s electricity is consumed by the 200,000 base stations across China. This measure comes on top of the recycling centers already installed and projects to develop solar power in base stations and telecommunication centers.

The eco-friendly technologies are provided by Nokia, Ericsson, Alcatel and Huawei. Nokia’s solution for 5′000 metropolitan base stations is expected to reduce as much as 73,000 tons of CO2 emissions a year - equivalent to the emission of 21,000 cars. By putting parts of the network not being used on standby mode, Ericsson announces 10 to 20% energy-savings per base station.

But then you hear about Huawei. The company claims that energy consumption of the equipment itself accounts for only 40% of operators’ total cost of ownership, the remaining 60% coming from air conditioners and other equipment. Their intelligent cooling uses fresh air as an alternative to air conditioning, a system that could save 30 to 70% of electricity. So much for high-end technology…

Despite having more than 550 million subscribers, the Chinese mobile market still has a lot of room to grow. Except that it won’t take place where you’d expect it: penetration in rural areas is still around 20% compared to 40% in cities.

Thanks to a 3-year project backed by Ericsson and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), lower-income farmers in remote villages are expected to be able to use their mobile phones soon to gain access to rural financial services - financing SME in China is one of the growth bottleneck. The project aims to overcome geographical isolation in the countryside, which has made access to rural financial services such as getting credit, sending remittances or making deposits expensive and difficult for people in rural China. China Mobile already offers an agricultural information service with advice on how to raise crops and animals, weather forecasts, news, and information on market prices for various products - for USD 0.25 per month per information category. 

Developing a mobile rural bank system will also allow Chinese banks to save a lot of money in comparison with having to create a physical infrastructure. The success of catering to lower-income population has already proven a success - bith for operators and for the citizen - in a number of developing countries (like Grameen Phone in Bangladesh).

So, the future is in the countryside!

Chinese authorities are investigating commercial text messages that were sent to more than 200 million mobile phone users (40% of all subscribers) through the networks of China Mobile and China Unicom.

The spamming has angered Chinese consumers. Already dubbed “Text-Message Gate”, the incident has even drawn public apologies from one major advertiser and China Mobile. It has also gotten the attention of the Ministry of Information Industry. Both the government and mobile operators are now working together to clarify regulations on identification and blocking of spam messages - the latter have launched hotlines of their own for users to report spam messages.

Will it be enough? Not as long there is no legal base in China for arbitrary trading of personal information!

What a pity… WAPI seems to be back. A proposal to make mandatory the expansion of WAPI (Wireless Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure), China’s domestically-developed WLAN standard, was submitted to the National People’s Congress this week. 

For sure, China’s domestic market is largely dominated by foreign-developed WLAN products. But the argument that reliance on them is harmful to state security is completely flawed - encryption software being one solution. The second argument, that without government intervention it will be impossible for WAPI to become the national standard, doesn’t either justify such a measure - in the end standards have to make economic sense.

The signs seem to be clear: Previous attempts to impose WAPI already caused severe trade frictions between China and the USA. ISO rejected China’s WAPI as an international WLAN standard in 2006, edaling a blow to China’s techno-nationalism. Even Chinese operators are starting WiFi projects across the country based on 802.11.

Beijing may have to realise that not all standards should be Chinese. Imposing standards will not only hurt the Chinese economy but also damage its image abroad.

Consumer price index (CPI), housing, and health care are some of the themes that attracted most public attention in China’s latest experiment of mobile democracy.  Chinese mobile users have been able to communicate with some political representatives during the annual parliament session using a program called Fetion - a low-price mobile phone interactive service introduced by China Mobile.

Even better! “Ask the Premier” - a joint-project between Xinhuanet.com (the official Chinese news agency) and China Mobile made available to more than 100 million mobile phone users - has collected over 250,000 short messages. In the words of the project’s initiators “Chinese mobile users are thus encouraged to orderly participate in politics”. In the meantime, NGOs all over the world are jumping on the “Olympic opportunity” to portray China as a repressive State where freedom of speech is scorned and democracy a distant dream. In fact, a recent survey by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences shows that today’s China doesn’t suffer a lack of opinions or ideas, but the channels for the people to express them.

Maybe the historical inclusion of “safeguarding the people’s right to expression” in the report to the Party Congress is a sign of changing times!