On July 6th, MIIT put forward specific goals on “reduce the network tariffs” in the special news conference: by the end of 2015, the mobile phone traffic data average tariff, fixed broadband average tariff should be reduced by 30%.
In addition, in June of this year, the three major operators put forward their own "improve the speed and cut down the tariff" programs. The mobile phone traffic data tariff decreasing goal that MIIT proposed was a little lower than China Mobile’s 35% decreasing goal, the broadband tariff reduction was slightly lower than 35% that China Telecom has proposed.
For the 30% reduction targets, some experts believed that it was not difficult to achieve this goal by the end of the year. "Take the mobile traffic data for example, there were very little 4G subscribers in last year, but it has increased to 200 million in May of this year. The rapid expansion of user scale reduced the per unit cost of network construction."
Among the three major operators, China Unicom bears obvious pressure in this tariff reducing process. Upgrading the mobile network from 3G to 4G is the basis for reducing the traffic data tariffs, since the 3G network traffic cost is significantly higher than that of 4G network. However, 4G business development of China Unicom is worse than the expectations, which also faces pressure from the competitors’ increased investment in 4G.