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Reuters reports that China Mobile has announced a new milestone of ten million iPhone users on its network, despite the fact that it is not an official iPhone carrier.
China Mobile, the world's largest mobile carrier by subscribers, has 10 million iPhone users even though it does not yet have an agreement with iPhone maker Apple, its chairman told Reuters on Monday.
Wang Jianzhou also said Apple had promised to make an iPhone compatible with China Mobile's TD-LTE standard when its next-generation model comes out. He could not say when this would happen.
With the iPhone incompatible with the TD-SCDMA 3G network used by China Mobile, the ten-million-user milestone comes even as users are limited to slower 2G network speeds.
China Unicom is currently the exclusive official iPhone carrier in China, although China Mobile and China Telecom have been working hard to strike deals to offer the device. Talks between Apple and China Mobile, the world's largest wireless carrier with over 600 million customers, have apparently been conducted at the highest levels, with Steve Jobs having been involved and Tim Cook even having been spotted at China Mobile's headquarters.
Top Rated Comments
(View all)And around my friends and families, there are about 15 of them using china mobile 2g, only less than 5 people got their iPhone through contract with china Unicom and have access to 3G network.
However this does not bother most people. China mobiles 2g network isn't that bad..The edge network is fast enough in doing emails and instant messaging, and its cheap.. I pay about 5 us dollars to get 300mb of data each month, it's more than enough.
Of course everyone would prefer a faster network. The real problem is that you cannot carry your phone number to other carriers. People like me have been using the same china mobile number for the past 10 years and I cannot afford to change. We had to purchase the iPhone handset separately.
So you can say there are 10 million customers waiting to see the real iPhone 5 comes with china mobile deal, and are all going to upgrade once it's available..
Steve is going to be happy to see this in heaven.
:D
Hint hint.