Three Chinese telecom operators ditch domestic roaming fees

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China Telecom confirmed on Thursday that it is scraping domestic long-distance roaming fees starting September 1.

Two other mobile operators, China Mobile and China Unicom, are following suit.

Chairman of China Telecom's board, Yang Jie, said the company will speed up the process of reducing other service fees during the company's forum for ecological industry in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has encouraged the reduction of telecommunication service fees in order to boost e-commerce.

"As we push for reducing telecommunication service fees, China is expected to experience e-commerce prosperity and the competition among service providers will continue to escalate," said Zhang Feng, Chief Engineer of Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Chinese consumers eagerly use mobile payments which require the use of roaming data where wi-fi is not available. /Xinhua Photo

According to Tencent Technology, the three companies have reduced the fees for international calls by 90 percent on average, and have reduced the cost of Synchronous Digital Hierarchy, a technology for synchronous data transmission on optical media, by over 15 percent.

Surprisingly, there has been mixed reactions from consumers to the announcement.

Some have cheered the prospect of more affordable mobile usage, while others worry telecom fraud may become more prevalent.