China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd.  has denied that its branch in Xiangtan City, Hunan Province, central China would launch a CNY 36 3G service package for students.

Although China Unicom has unified its charges for 3G services around the country, its branches hope that they could kick off more preferential promotions oriented to the local market.

The CNY 36 campus monthly service package is actually very attractive to customers, including 300MB 3G traffic, 240 free short messages, 50- minute local voice calls, and 10-minute local videophones.

Formerly, there were advertisements for similar service package in Jiangxi Province, south China. Some branches of China Unicom return call tolls, phone cards, and shopping cards per month to customers who choose expensive service packages.

China Unicom hopes that it could lure more high-end users for its 3G services while continue enlarging its 2G user base. By January 31, 2010, the company's 3G users have reached 3.595 million.

Fu Liang, a telecommunications analyst, believes that Chinese carriers will promote cheaper 3G service packages sooner or later. Current 3G charges set up a high threshold for 3G users.

China Unicom has built the world's largest WCDMA network, including 160,000 sell towers and covering 335 cities. Meanwhile, the company has completed HSPA+ network test in some cities and will deploy the network from this year.

Yan Ping, analyst of Guosen Securities, predicts that China Unicom's 3G users will surge by 1.3 million per month in the first half of 2010, because the company will change its charging strategy and lower the threshold for service packages.

By the end of December 2009, China's top three carriers had totally had a 3G-user base of 11.41 million, accounting for 1.5% of the country's mobile communications users.

China Telecom Corporation Ltd. (NYSE: CHA and SEHK: 0728) had the largest 3G-user base, which reached 5.262 million. 3G users took up about 19% of the new customers of China Unicom and China Telecom.

Notably, in 2009, mobile phone owners accounted for around 75% of China Unicom's 3G users, while the proportion for China Telecom was only about 20%, indicating that most of the latter's 3G users were holders of Internet access cards.

A consultancy advisor of Frost & Sullivan believes that the markdown of service packages is a general trend and the variety of China Unicom's WCDMA terminals is still few.

Although the company introduced iPhone at the end of October 2009, the introduction seems have not taken much effect to the promotion of China Unicom's brands.

source:enet