China Practically Unreachable By Western SMS?

Ainsy writes "A friend of mine recently began a placement as an English pronunciation teacher in China. She has picked up a pay-as-you go sim for use over there, only to discover that China seems to have been almost completely overlooked by international communications agreements, specifically from the UK. A bit of snooping tells me that Vodafone is the only network from which it is possible to send SMS to a Chinese registered mobile phone. SMS in China is upscaling massively, and is incredibly cheap currently — even 'premium' SMS info services cost 1 Yuan (that's just £0.081 GBP). I'm curious why such a large section of the world market is cut off from the west's wireless communication networks especially with the recent Olympics putting the spotlight on the nation in general. China mobile is the world's largest carrier ranked by subscriber base (415 million) and isn't even the only carrier to operate in China). There are a few websites around from which SMS can be sent to China for a fee but this is of only limited use when on the move. Can anyone tell me why this situation has come about and when we can expect this sort of service to be enabled?"

Shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

I write this from a small city in Fujian province (the south of China), and can tell you from experience that O2 and T-Mobile can also send SMS messages from the UK to my China Mobile PAYG phone here. It sounds to me like your friend has a bad phone...

Canada to China SMS - OK

[omkhar]

Not an issue in Canada. Both Rogers (China Mobile and China Unicom) and Bell (China Mobile) support sending SMS to china

Souce

http://www.rogers.com/web/content/wireless-text/international_txt

http://www.bell.ca/shopping/en_CA_ON.info/VasInternationalTextMsg.details?tab=SPECS

Re:Spam? top spammers are:

[kubitus]

reality looks like this:

USA 1590

China 442

Russia 304

SouthKorea 201

UK 184

http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/countries.lasso [spamhaus.org]

http://www.spamhaus.org/statistics/spammers.lasso [spamhaus.org]

no comment!

Depends on your carrier's Inter-Carrier SMS vendor

[Alereon]

It would be cost-prohibitive for a phone company to maintain connections to every company they want to exchange SMS with. Instead, they select one of the several companies that maintain inter-carrier messaging networks to deliver this traffic for them. These companies include VeriSign [verisign.com], Syniverse [syniverse.mobi], and Sybase 365 [sybase.com]. Which carriers you can exchange SMS with depends on which of these vendors your carrier has selected. In general, while they all have two-way reach to the major carriers internationally, each vendor has a different profile of smaller international carriers and countries in their portfolio.

Re:Is this for real?

[mystful]

Skype allows text messages to be sent from anywhere in the world for a very reasonable fee. All of my Chinese friends (on multiple carriers) have been able to send text messages to my American (ATT) cell phone as well...

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about? SMS certianly does support Chinese characters, as there are literally BILLIONS of text messages been sent in China each day, almost all in Chinese. All cell phones sold in China contains an input program that allows input of chinese characters using ordinary keypad.

The main reasons for lack of interconnect between foreign phone carriers and Chinese carriers could be either government censorship, or inability of the carriers to come to an agreement on what's reasonable price to charge.

Re:Shenanigans!

[francium de neobie]

Yeah, you do realize you're talking to a real, actual Chinese person in English?

You're wrong on so many levels.

First, there are many Chinese (even 1% out of 1.4 billion is still 14 million) who can perfectly talk and understand English. So, sending an English SMS message to them is perfectly fine.

Then, if the poor Chinese is confined to a phone with old styled 0-9*# keyboards, or QWERTY keyboards, he can type Chinese via input methods - basically he'll key in code sequences representing Chinese characters. If he switches the keyboard back to alphanumeric mode he can still type alphanumeric characters.

Finally, a Chinese with a iPhone and similar large touchscreen phones can just write Chinese characters on the screen. Again, typing alphanumeric characters can be accomplished by a simple mode switch.

Oh, and don't tell me Apple hasn't started selling iPhone in China yet. You can either buy that form Hong Kong (it's even unlocked out of the box), or from the black market.

Re:Those gymnasts were 016

[rs79]

(Ok so I'm a pedant that did a bit of PDP-8 programming, they use octal).

The number "8" doesn't show up in octal. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12....

Re:Is this for real?

[raju1kabir]

No. A more pragmatic answer would be that SMS does not and probably will never support Chinese characters, or logograms of any kind. It probably doesn't even support languages written in Greek or Cyrillic characters. SMS can created by latin script societies, and like ASCII before it, probably makes the most possible use out of the fairly small latin character set.

How on earth was this rated +4, insightful? It's patently retarded. I think a lot of people just score up anything that's longer than a few paragraphs without actually reading it.

I live in Malaysia where people send Chinese text messages all day long. I get them now and then as wrong numbers (my friends know I don't read Chinese). When I travel to Thailand I get Thai SMS spam on my phone all damn night long when I'm trying to sleep.

I did not install any special software or do anything special to my phone; it just worked. Worked with my previous phone too.

When I set my phone's input language to Chinese, the number of characters I can type per SMS charging unit changes from 160 to 70. A few seconds of googling based on that discovery turned up the fact that SMS messages can be encoded in UCS2 which allows most if not all Unicode characters. Read here: http://www.dreamfabric.com/sms/ [dreamfabric.com] for more than you ever wanted to know about the message format.

Re:Shenanigans!

[francium de neobie]

Most of the educated Chinese population is taught pinyin [wikipedia.org] when they were school children, pinyin is an encoding method of Chinese characters in alphabets and number. So, as long as you have passed primary school in China, you should be able to type in Chinese characters with pinyin in fixed keyboard mobile phones.

If you want to say primary schools aren't that popular in the poorer areas in China, you can just look at the numerous primary schools collapsed in the recent Sichuan earthquake - Sichuan isn't a particularly rich area in China. Basic education is available in most rich and poor areas of China. Finding a primary school in the middle of deserts or high mountains isn't easy, still, but not many people live in those places. If there's a people problem with SMS in China, it would be the mostly illiterate people of the older generation - those who never had a chance to go to school when China was poor, and are not going to school now because they're already old. They can't even read Chinese characters, much less typing in the pinyin. But how are you going to help them if they don't want to go back to school?

Unicode would be nice, yes. We have two different character sets for Chinese characters here - big5 for Traditional Chinese and GB for Simplified Chinese. Pain in the ass if you received an SMS from a person in Hong Kong who uses big5 - the message appears garbled because your phone decodes it in GB. But we can still fallback to English in that case.

Re:Is this for real?

[raju1kabir]

While an SMS service exists in China, I was speaking from the point of view of sending and receiving SMS messages to and from China. I doubt that the existing networks or handsets are compatible with each other, and the main reason for the lack of connectivity with Chinese or other networks is that the telcoms companies have not bothered to invest in the necessary upgrades. Given that international SMS text messages still cost a pretty penny, there is likely little demand for them to do so at this time.

Everything you say is still wrong.

UCS2-encoded SMS is a standard and works between handsets and networks. You honestly think that the billion Chinese speakers have all segregated themselves by handset maker, and Nokia users only SMS with other Nokia users? It's a preposterous notion and obviously false.

The "lack of connectivity with Chinese or other networks" hasn't been demonstrated. It's been asserted and then met with scores of counterexamples in this discussion. I myself have carried a phone to some 50 countries in the past few years, most of them poor and haggard, and my phone has worked in all of them (except Japan and Korea, where I had to rent at the airport). China included. I have received welcome messages and spam in the local scripts, as well as roaming info messages from my own Malaysian carrier in English. My friends have SMSed me and the messages have instantaneously appeared on my phone.

SMS messages may cost you a pretty penny, but it doesn't mean they're expensive in the abstract. My carrier charges me a flat EUR0.04 per outbound international text no matter where it's to, and they are making a profit doing it. So the raw cost (whatever they pay to the SMS exchange company) is clearly less than that.

What I think we have here, is an OP whose own carrier had some sort of problem exchanging messages with one number in China when he tried once or twice. Which is more forgivable than you, who are pulling cardinal nonsense straight out of your arse based on nothing at all.

Re:Is this for real?

[tpchur]

Um, I'm currently in a German 101 course and the eszett symbol is still in use. My textbook is current published in 2007.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, this is just plain wrong. There are no plans to remove the ß from the German language. There was an orthography reform that established a clear rule when to use ß and when to use ss:
After short vowels, you now use ss : e.g. Kuss
After long vowels, you still use ß : e.g. Straße

There are some words that were subsequently changed from ß to ss, but only some. And there are another 6 non-ASCII characters in the German language anyway: the umlauts ÄäÖöÜü

I have been looking into this for a while...

[wheaty73]

I have done quite a bit of research into sending and receiving SMS to/from China in the past couple of years, partly because I lived out there until recently and mainly because needed to keep in contact with people in the UK, and now the reverse is true (so I can keep in touch with people there). As has been said in other replies this isn't down to censorship as some suggest but to do with peering agreements between networks. There are 2 major Chinese mobile networks - China Mobile (CM) and China Unicom (CU) - although this is changing soon or may have already. CU has a majority CDMA network, with a small (crappy reception) GSM network. CM is mainly GSM. The Chinese mobile needs to have international SMS / Calling enabled on their contract. This sounds obvious but is easily overlooked! I have tested with the following UK networks - O2, Voda (business contract) and Orange. Sending from China to UK CM > O2 CM > Voda CM > Orange all messages send from China, arrive in UK fairly soon after. CU > O2 CU > Orange all messages send and receive as above CU > Voda Couldn't get messages to arrive. Now, from the UK > China, things were a lot simpler. Orange > CU Orange > CM Voda > CM Messages send and are received. O2 > CU, CM Voda > CU No messages are received but report sent. I have contacted both the latter networks, and although they have roaming agreements with both Chinese networks (to allow voice calls on users travelling in the others region) they don't with SMS, so they can't guarantee a message sent will arrive (so they don't). Voda told me they have no plans for this (odd, since it sent fine to CM), O2 said they were trying to reach agreements in time for the Olympics (which after a quick test now they haven't managed). So in my experience, Orange in the UK and CM in China are the way to go. Orange actually have a PAYG tariff called "Camel" now which gives ridiculously cheap SMS and voice to China so it actually works out cheaper for me anyway. Hope that is useful!

Re:Is this for real?

[DaveV1.0]

Nope, you are completely wrong.

SMS is very popular in Japan and China. And, international interoperability between many U.S. carriers and China is going quite well. I know because I work for a company that makes it possible. We have millions of SMS and MMS messages flowing through our servers to many different countries.

Most cell phones are loaded area specific alphabets, so Greek, Cryllic, and even Arabic is available on phones. I know because I worked for a major international cell phone manufacturer and have seen the phones.

Maybe you should actually learn about a subject before you prove your ignorance.

Re:Is this for real?

[Dan541]

Ive never had any issues with receiving SMS on China Mobile. I suggest the author get a decent service provider because this problem has never existed for me.