In the second quarter of 2004, China's Ministry of Information Industry (MII) received 2760 written requests from mobile users, of which 373 were complaints about China Telecom, 704 about China Netcom, 611 for China Mobile, 562 for China Unicom, 172 for China Railcom and 338 about other smaller enterprises.

MII found that the majority of the complaints were resolved quickly because these complaints were caused by either the users' lack of knowledge about relevant policies or their misunderstanding of the telecom's services. As a result, 209 cases needed further investigation but of that total only 67 cases were placed in the final records.

Interesting details about the 67 cases are as follows:

The breakdown of enterprises involved are: China Telecom (4), China Netcom (11), China Mobile (20), China Unicom (25), China Railcom (6), China Satellitecom (1). So far, all the enterprises have responded to MII and have given their feeback on the users' cases.

2. Users' requests mainly focused on mobile phone services like SMS and IVR, which accounted for 62.7% of the total 67 cases. In particular, SMS overcharging, much like what Sohu was accused of late last week, was a big complaint from users.

3. Users' complaints about inter-network conversation quality seems to be on a rise. This is a symptom, perhaps, of both old and new technologies meeting and provincial carriers using older systems.