After Shandong Province shut down the PHS service, Beijing Unicom speeds up its network quitting as well.
Beijing Unicom announced that, because of equipment supplement and technology support problems of PHS, the communication service quality cannot be guaranteed and will be terminated on December 31th, 2014.
Insider say that there are two reasons for speeding up the shut down of PHS. Firstly, there are decreasing users and the revenue are hard to remedy maintenance cost, moreover, equipment manufacturers don’t produce related products any longer, so PHS removal can reduce the operator’s costs. Secondly, as 4G network construction accelerates, the frequency that PHS used becomes more important; after the quitting, the frequency can be used to reduce 4G network construction cost.
MIIT has formulated policy in 2009 to require PHS to quit the market and previously, operators in Hubei, Guangdong, Shandong, Fujian introduced same measures as well. Since May 20th of this year, Shandong Unicom has terminated PHS service in 17 regions in the province and it launches policy of number portability and users can update to 2G service.
The independent telecom analyst Fu Liang says, PHS users have low APUR and cannot support PHS network maintenance cost as users decrease; manufacturers don’t produce related equipment any longer, operators cannot continue their support on network, so PHS has to quit the market.
Statistics of China Telecom show until the end of September, there are still 1.36 million PHS users with the reduction of 1.13 million in this quarter, and reduction of 4.68 million compared with the same quarter in last year.
After quitting, the frequency resource that PHS used to occupy may become the new focus.
PHS network has been occupied certain excellent frequency resource, 1900-1910MHz. In October of 2002, the previous the Ministry of Information Industry used to stipulate 1880-1920MHz as the main working frequency of TDD mode. In the beginning of 2012, the Minister of Industry and Information Technology announced that, 1.9GHZF frequency that PHS used will be reused in TD-LTE network. But China Mobile actually does not obtain the frequency resource due to unfinished PHS quitting.
Vice President of Communication Strategy Department of Nomura Research Institute, Tao Xujun says,the frequency that PHS occupies is in low band and has strong penetration with better communication quality and experience, what is more important, in the same range, low frequency can reduce the amount of base stations thus reducing the cost.
An insider reveals that China Mobile has always been eager to obtain PHS’s frequency resources, which is rejected by China Unicom and China Telecom out of the unfinished PHS quitting; now, every operator are managing to obtain this range of frequency to support own service.
Xu Sen, from Network Technology Research Department of China Telecom Beijing Telecommunication Research says, China Telecom is also promoting PHS users update to transfer the network, remove PHS frequency and support TD-LTE network development.