An attendee uses a mobile device as she passes the China Mobile stand on the second day of the 2017 Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain. (Photo : Getty Images)
The service operators of China Mobile will eliminate long-distance and domestic roaming call charges as data services become their major source of revenue.
Chen Zhaoxing, vice minister of the Industry and Information Technology, announced at a news conference that the fees will be canceled as of Oct. 1 this year.
The decision for the mobile fee cut came after Premier Li Keqiang delivered a government work report which promises measures in ensuring fast and more cost-effective information networks.
After users had long complained about roaming fees that were introduced 23 years ago, China began a campaign aimed at faster and more affordable Internet connections in 2015.
Chen said: "The ministry has made solid progress toward the target with joint efforts by China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom."
The operators already unveiled plans to phase out the fees in Aug. 2016. To support this, they haven't introduced service plans that charge those fees since then.
The efforts of phasing out the charges resulted in the stellar growth of China's 4G mobile service users. It increased from fewer than 100 million reported in 2014 to 770 million as of now, which is more than half of the world's total.
As carriers are vying for these consumers, they unveiled competitive data plans for them to choose through more content on handsets.
China Unicom introduced a plan called "Ice Cream" on Feb. 24. This is a plan that gives users no monthly cap on call time and data for only 398 yuan. This is tough competition for its rivals already rolled out schemes featuring high data quotas before China Unicom introduced "Ice Cream."
Official data showed that approximately 9.38 billion gigabytes of data were consumed through mobile Internet use in 2016. This is up 123.7 percent compared to the previous year, as users consumed 98.3 percent more data on average every month.
"A dent in profits will be overweighed by more consumption, employment, and economic growth," said the former chairman of China Mobile Xi Guohua.
Chen added: "China will continue to improve the market environment for telecommunications by further opening the market and promoting benign competition."
