Shanghai won't restrict Little Smart business: Official
15/1/2004 15:15
Shanghai telecommunications authority will not restrict the
development of Little Smart service, or a citywide wireless phoning service, in
the city, a senior telecom official said yesterday.
The government will
neither encourage the business and local telecom operators are all free to deal
with the business in accordance to the market demand, said Li Zhenkun, vice
director of Shanghai Telecommunications Administration, cited by today's Youth
Daily.
Li made these remarks yesterday at the press conference of the pending
12th Shanghai International Information and Telecommunications Expo, which will
be held in June.
Since Shanghai Telecommunication Corp's launch of Little
Smart business in Shanghai last year in its suburban districts as Songjiang,
Fengxian and Nanhui, the cheap phoning service has gained a steady growth in the
city as in the country.
By the end of 2003, the city's Little Smart users hit
130,000, according to an assistant to Shanghai Telco's President. The assistant,
only surnamed Zhang in the Youth Daily report, expects a further growth of the
number this year. His company has just started the service in downtown
areas.
Meanwhile, Little Smart handset manufactures are stepping up with
their research and development to make the low-end phone service adapted to
networks of advanced telecom technologies in an attempt to break the bottleneck
of the lower-end technology's development, industry analysts noted.
UTStarm
Inc., for example, is developing a dual-model handset that will have the Little
Smart phone also connected to networks of the three-generation
technologies.
If the research successful, Little Smart users will be able to
receive and send multi-media messages via their phones.
UTStarcom is
reportedly developing the new messaging function.
Jane Chen / Shanghai Daily news
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