Wang Chuanbao, vice general manager of China Netcom's Beijing branch, says that the company will not give up its Personal Access Phone System.

Whether the PAS business will be kept or not after the restructuring of Chinese telecommunications operators has been a focus of the industry. There was a rumor that the PAS users would be merged into a CDMA network. However, Wang says that it is only hearsay at present although it might be taken into consideration in the future.

Wang says that the PAS business has its peculiarities and it has a certain market demand. In Beijing, there are more than 30,000 base stations to offer services for more than 800,000 stable PAS users. Apart from the basic phone services, the Internet service for PAS has also recently been unveiled.

However, as charges for GSM and CDMA mobile phones have dropped, PAS has started to lose its low-price advantage and some PAS users have shifted to China Mobile and China Unicom, who almost stopped their PAS businesses in 2007. In the first half of 2008, the number of China's PAS users decrease by 6.808 million.