Recently, after China Unicom announced the official launch of GPRS services, it will carry out a larger-scale expansion of the GPRS network nationwide, with the goal of covering all prefecture-level cities. It is reported that currently, Unicom's "MMS" service has achieved interconnectivity between users of China Mobile.
On May 21, China Unicom announced that it had begun to provide data services based on the GPRS mobile communication network. Previously, Unicom Group had announced on its website that it would spend one year upgrading GSM to GPRS in 70 cities across the country, while officially launching three GPRS services including WAP, multimedia messages, and JAVA-based data value-added services.
It is understood that China Unicom's "MMS" service has achieved interconnectivity with China Unicom C-network and China Mobile G-network users; at the same time, China Unicom's Color-e through the Unicom MMS gateway also interconnects with China Mobile MMS. This is the first interconnection of data services between China Unicom's C and G networks, and more importantly, the first interconnection of data services between China Unicom and China Mobile, the two major operators.
China Unicom Vice President Li Gang stated that the official upgrade of China Unicom's G network to GPRS marks the formal entry of China Unicom into the 2.5G era, and the data interconnection between the two major operators will be a milestone in the arrival of the data age in China's telecommunications field.
The industry believes that the large-scale upgrade of the Unicom GPRS network will meet the needs of more Unicom G-network users for data services, which will play a positive role in maintaining the existing market share of G-network users and acquiring incremental market share, and can also improve the profitability of the Unicom G network.