China's three major telecom operators, China Telecom, China Mobile, and China Unicom, announced plans to cancel long-distance call fee and roaming fees within China from September 1, 2017, which is one month earlier than the deadline set by the State Council of China.
On July 27, 2017, China Telecom's chairman Yang Jie announced that starting from September 1, China Telecom will cancel long-distance call fees and roaming fees within China, which is expected to bring benefits to 80 million users.
Following that, China Unicom and China Mobile also announced the same plans to cancel the long-distance call and roaming fees from September 1.
Statistics from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology show that by the end of June 2017, China had 1.36 billion mobile phone users. However, communications industry experts said that the cancellation of long-distance call and roaming fees has little influence on ordinary consumers, because most users subscribe to packages that already cover roaming services and use networking voice services to serve the communications function.
According to a report on China's telecommunications operation in 2016 published by the MIIT in January 2017, during the year of 2016, over half of the net profits of the three major Chinese telecom operators were from mobile phone data businesses.
