According to information from the customer service center of China Telecom, the China Telecom Shanghai branch has started to release the mobile phone numbers beginning with 189, which are especially reserved for the CDMA network, to designated users.

Since China Telecom took over the CDMA network from China Unicom on October 1, 2008, new users of the CDMA network could only select the 133 and 153 mobile phones numbers previously owned by China Unicom and the time for the release of the 189 numbers, which are allocated by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology to China Telecom for the CDMA network, had not yet been published.

Starting from December 1, 2008, China Telecom Shanghai branch took the initiative to contact designated users to launch the first batch of the 189 mobile phone numbers. The release of the first batch of mobile phone numbers will last until December 20, 2008. After that, the 189 mobile phone numbers will be generally opened to the public.

At present, China Telecom has published an introduction about how to book a 189 mobile phone number on its official website and the webpage specially designed to test the 189 mobile phone e-mail box has also been launched.