Following China Mobile and China Telecom, China Unicom has officially approved the MVNOs to launch 4G resale service recently. On May 28th, China Unicom has announced to open 4G resale service, and planned to open 4G network services to MVNOs in July. According to the data, subscribers of China Unicom mobile resale service have exceeded 5 million, and the market share is close to 90%.
Suning will be the first MVNO to launch 4G resale service of China Unicom in July. The 1708 and 1709 number resources will be used as 4G numbers, for the existing subscribers of these two number sections, Suning said it would open the access for 3G migrating to 4G as soon as possible.
The general manager of Suning Gu Wei said, at present, China Unicom 4G resale service have entered the final test stage in Suning, and will be opened for applications on July 6th. During the test, the download speed of China Unicom 4G resale network reached 140Mbps and 44Mbps in the upload speed.
Previously on February 28th, China Mobile has opened 4G resale service to several MVNOs, Suning, Gome, Sharing mobile and others have launched 4G services. For the tariff, the adjustment covered base price of voice, traffic data, WLAN, SMS, MMS and other business of China Mobile resale service.
MVNO Phoenix Assets was the first one that launched China Telecom 4G resale service. There were two 4G resale solutions that China Telecom provided: the first is the resale of resource pools, the second is resale of packages, but the MVNOs can only choose one of them.
A person in charge of the resale service of major operators said, the 2G/3G business of MVNOs are focused on voice and SMS services, it’s relatively simple to "keep the SIM card" (monthly cost less than 5 yuan). For 4G services, especially for the backward traffic data payment model, it is not easy to operate, if the operators open 4G business freely to the MVNOs, it may cause a waste of resources and even lead to market confusion.