By Stephen Phillips
A leading official of the Chinese government told IT industry executives gathered in San Francisco on Friday that Beijing would guarantee internet access to the country’s 1.3bn inhabitants at half the rate of local phone calls.
Chang Xiaobing, deputy-director general of the Telecommunications Administration Bureau at China’s Ministry of Information Industry earmarked price as a key determinant of internet adoption in the world’s largest domestic market. The MII in concert with top Chinese ministers sets policy and defines the regulatory environment for the country’s IT and telecommunications industry. Chang also threw Beijing’s weight behind a prominent role for application service providers offering web hosted services based on China’s fledgling IP infrastructure.
Chang was addressing the annual Asia Pacific Information Technology Summit attended by many IT industry executives eager to sound out Chinese officials on the commercial implications of Monday’s agreement between the US and China. The deal struck between the US and China opens up the country’s telecommunications service providers to 49% direct foreign ownership as a precondition of Chinese membership of the World Trade Organization, rising to 50% after two years of membership. However although pressed repeatedly by questions from the floor after his podium speech, Chang said he would reserve comment until after the agreement is set in stone. The US-china deal awaits ratification from the other members of the international trade protocol group and approval from the US congress.
Meantime, industry executives spoken to by ComputerWire extended a cautious welcome to the deal. Everything agreed to hasn’t been tested in practice but we’re confident that it will work, said Eric Benhamou, president and chief executive officer of 3Com Corp, which supplies networking equipment to number-one Chinese carrier, China Telecom Corp. This is not a force fit, there is strong pull from both sides, he added.
China has the fastest-growing telecommunication market in the world, tipped by Edward Tian, chief executive of China Netcom Corp, the country’s number-three state telecommunications company, to outstrip the US in value within ten years. Chang of the MII said that by the Chinese government’s own measures, the country would witness 16 million new wireless mobile phone users and 5 million new internet users in 1999. He said the number of mobile phone users in China currently stood at 30 million.
Heather Killen, vice president, international, of internet portal, Yahoo! Inc, which set up a division dedicated to Chinese content recently, predicted that high penetration of mobile phones plus pagers, in china would see internet access in the country led by non-PC devices linked to IP-based networks.
