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Phone firms tapping into rural areas
By Li Weitao (China Daily)
Updated: 2006-03-14 05:40
A farmer's best friend used to be an ox; and a merchant's, a cart. But in
this era of modernization, Li Linjun, a farmer-merchant in Northwest China's
Shaanxi Province, has a new best friend his mobile phone.
He can talk shop with vendors and buyers of his pig feed whether working on
the farm or driving his mini-truck. With his mobile phone, he runs the business
from his home village in the sprawling Baoji area, a mountainous region of
Shaanxi.
An increasing number of families in Li's village are now signing up for
telephone services, benefiting from a programme initiated by the central
government called Cun Cun Tong meaning connecting every village.
Completing the Cun Cun Tong programme and connecting every village by
telephone fixed lined and mobile is part of China's telecommunication
development plan for the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006-10).
The programme already covers most villages, although the most difficult part
is providing connections for remote areas, Su Jinsheng, director of the Bureau
of Telecommunications Administration at the Ministry of Information (MII), told
China Daily.
Under official classification, a village means an "administrative village."
In most places it is a natural grouping of farmhouses but in sparsely-populated
regions, it may just mean an administratively defined area.
In early 2004, when the programme was launched, telephone services were
available in 630,000 villages, or around 91 per cent of the nation's total, Su
said.
The figure had been raised to 97 per cent by November 2005, when another
50,000 or so villages were added to the existing networks of China Mobile, China
Telecom, China Netcom and China Unicom.
Network development efforts are now focused on the remaining 2-3 per cent of
villages in the coming five years, Su stressed.
The widespread use of telecommunications is bringing a lot of changes to
farmers' lives in saving lives, especially in medical emergencies, and in
raising incomes.
And in many villages, the network coverage in Li's case by China Mobile is by
no means inferior to that in the cities. People have choices, too: the cheaper
fixed-line service is often easily available although the line may be too weak
for broadband Internet connection.
Cun Cun Tong requires at least two telephones in a village, one in the public
telephone booth and the other in the office of the villagers' committee, Su
said.
The government has been pouring huge amounts of money into rural
infrastructure projects to help local people diversify their sources of income
and shake off poverty. Among the most common projects are telecommunication,
power grids, television relay stations and roads.
Building networks in the countryside, especially in mountainous villages, can
be costly and often unprofitable, industry officials said, although indirectly,
it has a great potential for generating wealth for the locals.
In Baoji, where Li Linjun lives, China Mobile's local branch has invested 300
million yuan (US$37.5 million) in the past few years for building and optimizing
rural networks.
In January, while continuing to invest in network development, China Mobile's
Baoji branch launched a project in which farmers can search and post on their
mobile phones information about their farm production and related services.
China Mobile - the country's biggest network - has invested 9 billion yuan
(US$1.12 billion) to cover around 95 per cent of the villages, some of which
still have no electricity or roads, according to its chairman Wang Jianzhou.
In telecommunications, Su said, China has already exceeded the target set
five years ago by as much as 38 per cent. Network coverage, especially for
mobile phones, is much wider than other developing countries including India.
For the 11th Five-Year Plan, Su said: "We want to see a telephone service in
each administrative village and Internet service in each town."
Under government classification, towns and townships are one level above
villages, and there are 36,900 towns and townships.
In terms of service quality, there is still a long way to go, Su admitted, as
the minimum of two telephones in a village may be far from enough.
But fortunately, operators are beginning to see quick rewards for their
continuing rural investment. In some recent cases, Su reported, the increase in
rural users has been "beyond anticipation."
With the telecom penetration rate already high in cities, the majority of
newly-added telephone subscribers are from rural areas.
In Beijing and Shanghai, according to Wang of China Mobile, the figure stands
at 97.8 per cent and 82.9 per cent.
And in Guangzhou, it is 117 per cent, meaning some people already own more
than one phone, which will push operators to tap the rural market more
aggressively.
"The vast rural areas still have huge potential," Wang said.
(China Daily 03/14/2006 page1)
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