China Mobile's 400 million users will be allowed to switch to the carrier's 3G services with their current numbers from next year, the world's No. 1 mobile operator said yesterday.

The move, which is expected to boost the homegrown 3G industry, will be trialed in three cities including Tianjin in northern China, Shenzhen, in southern China's Guangdong Province, and Xiamen, Fujian Province in the southeast. It will then be made available in 38 major cities nationwide, according to Wang Jianzhou, China Mobile chairman.

Under the new policy, China Mobile's 2G users will be able to switch to 3G services directly after plugging in their SIM (subscriber identity model) card to a 3G model. China Mobile won't require users to change mobile numbers or register at the carrier's outlet, according to Wang.

China Mobile started the country's first 3G service in April but it received a lower-than-expected market response as people had to change to a new number for TD-SCDMA (time division-synchronous code division multiple access) service, industry insiders said.

China Mobile had 270,000 TD-SCDMA users in 10 cities with the TD-SCDMA network.

China Mobile recently cut the mobile communications rate for TD-SCDMA services, bringing it closer to the fixed-line phone rate, to woo enterprise, family and campus users.

It will gradually launch new packages, offering rate cuts of around 50 percent.

"It's nice to offer the cut rate and retained numbers, but the key problem is the handset," Sandy Shen, a Shanghai-based analyst at Gartner Inc, a United States-based IT research firm, said yesterday.

The mobile phone variety number for TD-SCDMA was still limited, which was a disadvantage for TD-SCDMA compared with other 3G services like CDMA2000 and WCDMA (wideband-CDMA), experts said.

In Shanghai, the number of video calls, the key function of 3G, reached 15,000 during the National Day holidays, said Shanghai Mobile.

(Shanghai Daily October 7, 2008)