Chinese carriers to scrap roaming charges by year end

By Zhu Shenshen | August 19, 2016, Friday |

Online Edition

CHINESE phone users will not have to pay any roaming call charges by the end of this year.

The scraping of the roaming fee also represents a business transformation for carriers China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, who have moved from traditional voice business to 4G and various data services, analysts said.

It will bring profit but also revenue pressures to the state-owned carriers to some extent because consumers have already adopted instant messaging tools like WeChat, FaceTime and QQ.

China Mobile, the country’s largest operator with more than 800 million users, said it would scrap domestic roaming charges by 2016. It has already stopped selling packages that include domestic roaming charges, Li Yue, president of China Mobile, said.

In Shanghai, China Mobile has stopped charging users domestic roaming fee in all 4G packages already.

China Unicom plans to cancel the roaming fee from October 1, while China Telecom will wait till the end of the year.

The roaming fee, almost double the local call cost on average, had irked consumers who wanted it scrapped for a long time. And then in April, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology asked carriers to “gradually stop charging” the fee.

For carriers now developing 4G and data business is the new income growth engines.

China Mobile had more than 429 million 4G users by the end of June, 51 percent of its total user base.

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Chinese carriers to scrap roaming charges by year end

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