Chinese Government has just reprimanded the China’s second largest mobile phone provider, China Unicom, which is the only authorized operator of iPhone in the area, over unfair rules introduced as recent as last month.
China Unicom is the exclusive cellular company in mainland China allowed to sell the Apple iPhone. Taking advantage of this liberty, The Next Web reported in November, that China Unicom has astonishingly threatened to freeze the accounts of iPhone owners who removed their SIM cards from their phones. This step is taken with the intention to neutralize the recently developed frequent customer practice of signing up with China Unicom to buy iPhone, and later cutting down their existing China Mobile SIM cards to use in their iPhones. China Mobile, another SIM provider, has lately been encouraging its subscribers to do this by providing a free SIM cutting service and a telephone hotline to help users switch between different networks.China’s local state news reporter Xinhua quoted an anonymous ministry official having being said that China Unicom should, “Respect and protect the legitimate rights and interests of telecommunications users, improve the service agreement, and improve service quality,”
Whereas replying to previous statement, China Unicom’s spokesperson, Wen Baoqiu stated in a phone interview published in Business Week: “The ministry requires every enterprise to respect and protect consumer rights; our new rules haven’t harmed consumer interests. It was in order to protect consumer rights that we issued these rules. It doesn’t mean the ministry is unhappy with the rules. They are not happy or unhappy.”
Anyhow, it is yet not decided that whether China Unicom will actually change their terms and conditions and withdraw the threat to users to switch operators or not.
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