Ni hao Wi-Fi – over 1 billion mobile subscribers in China, and growing…

Tuesday, July 31st, 2012 Han Dong, Sr. Product Marketing Manager

China is the world’s largest mobile market.

With over 1 billion mobile subscribers (just slightly ahead of India), China has over THREE TIMES the number of mobile users as the U.S.  Breaking down this number a bit further (according to mobiThinking), over 400 million users are mobile internet users (beyond voice and text), and over 150 million are connecting on 3G networks.  Any way you slice it, China represents the largest smartphone and mobile internet market in the world.

So if the population of mobile users is huge in China, why is only 15% of the traffic over 3G (or even faster 4G/LTE networks for that matter)?  Perhaps this is due to the high cost of 3G in China (Chinese mobile users may be more price sensitive than users in other parts of the world).  Perhaps it is an issue of 3G infrastructure build out not keeping pace – China is expanding faster than the underlying infrastructure can keep up, so this wouldn’t be a surprise (ex. the recent floods in Beijing).  Perhaps it is a combination of BOTH cost and infrastructure  build-out.  If this is the case, the opportunity for low-cost, high-performance Wi-Fi in China makes a great deal of sense.

China’s wireless data needs are the big (1 billion subscribers) and wide (given its geographical spread).  The call for Wi-Fi to supplement and fill the gap of scarce OR even non-existent 3G/4G networks seems the ideal solution.

Today, iPass has relationships with China Telecom and China Mobile.  We’re actively helping these carriers to create the world’s largest global Wi-Fi-exchange, by enabling China’s growing population of mobile subscribers to take advantage of the iPass global Wi-Fi footprint of over 780,000 hotspots – thus providing international Wi-Fi roaming wherever they go.

China’s mobile users continue to grow. The proliferation of mobile devices continue to grow.  iPass is there to make that growth (and increasing demand for mobile data) painless.

Tags: carriers