Cost breaks at last for mobile-phone users [from SH Daily]
MOBILE-PHONE users in China will finally pay less for national calls from next month.
The Ministry of Information Industry and the National Development and Reform Commission said yesterday the fees for both incoming and outgoing domestic long-distance calls will be cut.
Incoming domestic calls will cost no more than 0.4 yuan (5.6 US cents) a minute, while for outgoing calls, the fee will be cut to 0.6 yuan a minute, the ministry said on its Website.
Under the present system, callers are asked to pay long-distance and roaming fees, which can cost up to 1.50 yuan a minute, about 10 times the cost of a local call. The new prices will cut charges for mobile subscribers by between 54 percents and 73 percents.
Local services now cost 0.4 yuan per minute for users paying monthly, and 0.6 yuan for those under prepaid schemes. The statement also made it clear that no further fees, which are now an additional 0.07 yuan for every six seconds, will be charged if the roaming service occupies a long-distance phone line.
In January, the regulators put two proposals on the table at a long-awaited public hearing in Beijing in a bid to lower roaming fees, which many mobile-phone users have complained about for some time.
Most of the 18 representatives at the hearing preferred to charge 0.70 yuan a minute for making calls and 0.30 yuan for incoming calls. The other proposal suggested a 0.4-yuan basic charge plus a domestic long-distance fee, which varies from different provinces.
The hearing was attended by five consumers - including one from Shanghai - and representatives from mobile-service providers, experts, scholars and government officials.
Shen Changzheng, a consumer who attended the hearing, told Xinhua news agency that the final plan "was acceptable, but was not up to the expectations of consumers," adding "there is still a great gap."
China's mainland, with 547.3 million mobile-phone users by December last year, is the largest market in the world. Yet the country is the only one that charges user-roaming fees across one network in different provinces and cities.
Also by December, China's fixed-line users fell by 2.3 million to 365.4 million from a year earlier.
The price incentives may be a boost for the mainland's two carriers, China Mobile Ltd and China Unicom Ltd, to further expand their user base and wireless businesses.
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