China Mobile and Apple Bring iPhone to China Mobile’s 4G & 3G Networks | Hacker News Reader

China Mobile and Apple Bring iPhone to China Mobile’s 4G & 3G Networks

apple.com

55 pointssc9040 comments

Here's the most important sentence:

    China Mobile is the world’s largest mobile
    services provider by network scale and
    subscriber base, serving over 760 million
    customers.

The NYT has some more context, too: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/technology/apple-and-china...

... and like 80% of its subscribers are GPRS or EDGE users.

If that's true, the remaining 20% is about as large as half the US population.

For the remaining 3G users, 80% are likely TD-SCDMA disguised as land line telephones.

It's a Chinese thing, where you pay for a "fixed line" telephone set, but no need for actual wires to your home. Communication were done via wireless TD-SCDMA.

> via wireless TD-SCDMA.

Or EDGE.

Actually there are two or three such phones in my office.

so, in other words, the world's largest 4G expansion opportunity?

Well, Chinese policy requires TDD-LTE devices to be compatible with TD-SCDMA.

The majority also use unbranded/local/clone Android handsets (including ones that look like iPhones).

Slightly off topic but this line made me chuckle:

    iPhone 5s, the most forward-thinking smartphone in the world 
    and iPhone 5c, the most colorful iPhone yet

I guess that's a PR problem you have to deal with when you release the best of your efforts alongside a lower cost version!

When I bought a new car a while ago, my mom asked what color it was (black) and my dad asked what kind it was (g37). Some people don't really care how fast it is if its pretty.

I wonder if this was timed precisely so they could meet demand in the rest of the world for Christmas. With that rush obviously ending on Christmas day, they start taking orders for China Mobile on that day.

Or maybe it has more to do with Chinese New Year then with Western holidays.

Quite possible. I am not well versed in Chinese holidays, but from an American perspective the timing implies they wanted to meet Christmas demand before adding in such a large market. Thanks for your perspective though, I guess I have a little learning to do.

Christmas has been adopted in China as one of the country's largest retail holidays (obviously with no religious affiliation), so I'm sure demand for the iPhone is very strong during Christmas in China as well. It seems likely that the timing is designed around CNY but w/ the new Chinese consumerism, demand is likely very strong throughout the year.

This is clearly timed for CNY, like the iPhone 4 release was. January is China's largest retail season as there is a lot of gift buying for the early February golden week when everyone goes back to see their family.

But go to the Apple store any night and its extremely crowded. Its like IKEA but a lot more packed since the space is much smaller.

One tiny problem with this is that there is no 4G service is currently available in china. China mobile also does not run a standard 3G network they run a proprietary 3G network standard that only chinese phones made for their network can run on, it looks like the 4G is going to be proprietary also, 4G/TD-LTE and 3G/TD-SCDMA. I dont know how they are going to be ready to have 3G and 4G ready for the iphone by the end of this year. So this means those iphones to be sold by china mobile will be using the proprietary 3g and 4g standard that cant be used outside of china. Many customers who travel will be very upset when they realize their iphone data network wont work outside of china

Both TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE are standardised by 3GPP, just like WCDMA and FD-LTE. So they are not proprietary standards.

TD-SCDMA are incredibly unstable technologies, or China mobile has implemented them poorly; I'll take 3G on China Unicom anyday over CMCC's 3G.

The problem with these home grown "standards" is that no one else uses them and they never get the international support they need to become stable.

Mobile phone numbers cannot be ported from one mobile network in China to another.* Therefore, people are extremely reluctant to switch networks. Otherwise Apple fans would have all switched to China Unicom long ago.

Several of my friends use iPhones on China Mobile. They don't get 3G data speeds because China Mobile uses a different 3G standard, supported only by specific handsets. There are lots of Android-based choices.

* except for some very limited trials, none of which have been in tier 1 cities AFAIK

Will the iPhone 5s's currently on China Mobile be able to utilize the new high speeds once this occurs, or will they need a new special China Mobile iPhone to use the 3g/4g? If that were the case I would expect a large portion of people who already have iPhones to be upgrading very early.

You would likely need a phone that supports TD-SCDMA - which I dont think the iPhone has done.

Correct.

See huetsch's comment below.

If you only want 2G and 4G (but not 3G), then there's already a 5s that works with China Mobile.

Can anyone here share their real-life experience of China Mobile's 4G coverage in Beijing?

The A1530 actually falls back to 3G and then 2G depending on the part of Beijing. I don't really understand how that works, but the 3G is also much better than the 2G, which is pretty awful.

One very painful thing about the A1530 is that the 4G connection gets broken (and thrown back to 3G or 2G, depending on location) whenever a call comes in or you make a call out. You then have to manually reconnect to the 4G network. I don't really understand why this is. Maybe the voice data is being sent over the 4G network during a call or something? The China Mobile people told me explicitly about the problem. 4G has only been available since the 18th, so haven't had that much time with it, but coverage seems decent.

Thanks. With that being the case I'd feel like the sales estimations would all be rather low.

iPhone 5s's bought in Hong Kong (model A1530) work on the LTE network. The iPhone 5s's previously sold in the mainland, however, will not, as they lack the right chipset for receiving a TD-LTE signal. I'm guessing China Mobile will just be selling the A1530s.

Related question: In China, how annoying is it to switch numbers?

In America, nearly everything I have is linked to my email address, not phone number. I recently had to change phone numbers and it was a quick task -- just emailed all my friends & family I had a new number and that was that. (changing emails, on the other-hand, would be extremely time-consuming)

Are things not so email-linked in China? (I've noticed that a lot of services there, (even free wifi!!) are connected to mobile numbers, not email address).

It's really annoying, for the reasons you mentioned.

Apart from banks and online shopping sites, many offline loyalty programs (restaurants, massage, beauty ...) use mobile number as a unique identifier.

Having said that, I've noticed over the last few months that people I meet are more likely to request/offer a WeChat (威信) username than a phone number. Businesses are embracing WeChat for marketing-related activity, but I don't yet see any indication that WeChat will become the primary mechanism for transactional notices.

Thanks.

BTW, the Hanzi are 微信 :)

Oops. Too late to edit now :(

> In China, how annoying is it to switch numbers?

Take out the sim card, put another one in. I've done it a few times. Free wifi is a recurring pain that is orthogonal to if you change your number or not.

But you'd better change your number with the banks, I don't have anything else that is really linked.

In France, you can change operator, and your number comes with you. I haven't changed my phone number for 10 years!

Same in the UK. It used to take a few days. Now it's more like minutes/hours.

Wonder what the structure of that deal is? China mobile held out this long so they wanted something or we're not willing to give up what Apple asked for.

Or vice versa. Unicom was killing China Mobile at the high end since it had iPhone and China mobile didn't. Even China Telecom had iPhone for crying out loud!

Could this announcement have had any influence on the allegations about evasi0n's decision to "rush their jailbreak" or however you read that drama https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6951647

Seems unlikely, given it's been brewing for months (years?). China Mobile had already started selling iPhones a few weeks ago, with in store displays. Far more likely that someone was about to leak the jailbreak without the stuff they were (allegedly) paid to add, which would completely devalue/derail their own deal.

...and any apps that government doesn't like will be cens^h^h^h^hbanned.

Could you name some apps in the US apple store that the US government would care about banning?

"The New York Times"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com