Individual Telecommunications Tariffs in Chinese Communities

In mainland China, the first public mobile operator—China Telecom—started its mobile services in 1987 under heavy government involvement and as a state-owned enterprise, with 700 subscribers. Due to the booming domestic economy, the mobile communications market has developed rapidly since its initiation (see Figure 1). This is reflected in the number of mobile users as well as in the number of mobile operators. In terms of absolute volume, there were about 400 million mobile subscribers at the end of December 2005 (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2005). In terms of absTRacT