2015 is the second year of virtual operators, and also the last year in pilot phase. According to the informed sources, because of the uneven development status of the 41 virtual operators, after the pilot period by the end of 2015, licenses of enterprises with poor performance will be revoked by the government.
According to relevant statistics, after more than half a year’s development, dozens of virtual operators only got less than 2 million subscribers till now, most of which are of China Unicom resale business, followed by China Telecom, and China Mobile is expected to start number allocation in the first quarter of this year. Judging from the user scale, the attitudes of subscribers and the market are far less than that the virtual operators have declared.
Some person in charge of virtual operators said in an interview with Tencent Tech, "Over the past six months, some virtual operators advertised extensively, while some kept in silence about the development, but they all try to advance step by step, and the majority keep a wait-and-see attitude."
In their view, many reasons have resulted in this phenomenon. For the major part, the government encourages private enterprises to join the telecom industry, but it lacks effective supervision and unified development standard, which leads to uneven development; on the other hand, when it comes to specific market behavior, it also lacks standard supervision in the cooperation between basic operators and virtual operators, while the wholesale price is higher than the retail price remains another serious problem, which become the largest obstacle of virtual operators ever since they emerged.