This is a major move forward, as China has 26.5 million netizens and China Unicom recorded 30 million subscribers by the end of June. The link-up may encourage an increase in both mobile phone users and netizens.

China Unicom is the country's second operator to provide such services, the other being China Mobile.

Wireless data services, or mobile Internet, has reported rapid growth in China this year.

However, that benefit is enjoyed by China Mobile alone, as it used to be the only wireless data service provider.

One of the most popular wireless data services, the short message, has recently become very popular among young mobile phone users.

China Mobile estimated that it would collect 1 billion yuan (US$120 million) this year from charges for short messages.

Presently it charges 0.1 yuan (1.2 US cents) for sending one message, while receiving is free.

China Unicom, which is looking to take a greater market share from the dominant China Mobile in the mobile telecom market, will not let that money go.

"We decided to provide such services after careful planning and preparation, as the volume of data services should surpass that of voice service in the not too distant future," said Lu Jianguo, vice-president of the mobile operator.

Named UNI-INFO, China Unicom's wireless data service will offer mainly short message subscription services and content-on-demand services, such as weather forecasts, market information and the latest news.

The mobile operator has signed agreement with many popular Chinese portals like sina.com, netease.com, sohu.com and stockstar.com, to provide demand information for mobile phone users.

Services to be offered by UNI-INFO include general information, personal information managers, trading, entertainment, industry-specific applications and location-based information.

To sign up for UNI-INFO, subscribers of Unicom simply need to make sure their mobile handsets support short messaging service in Chinese. No additional procedure is required.

(China Daily 07/31/2001)