Along with the Snapdragon 808 powered Xiaomi Mi 4c, Xiaomi announced own wireless carrier – Xiaomi Mi Mobile which is actually a MVNO in China. The service is compatible with China Unicom and China Telecom 2G/3G/4G networks; it can only be bought online.
The Xiaomi Mi Mobile will offer both voice and data services; at the moment there are two plans on offer. First is the Pay as You Go, which charges RMB 0.10 ($0.02) per voice minute, SMS and 1MB of data on China Unicom. The other still has the same charge rate but costs RMB 59 ($9.25) monthly, gives 3GB of data and supports China Telecom.
Both plans supports free incoming calls, no roaming charges for calls with China and there is an optional caller ID for RMB 5 ($0.8) per month.
MVNOs is a popular phenomenon around the world including Africa, Europe, U.K and U.S but Xiaomi is trying to break the MVNO-barrier in China with the Mi Mobile but isn’t the only device making firm to have one, Google has Project Fi.
Due to the nature of government in China (Sovereignty) the country only has three major national carriers – China Mobile (more than 800 million), China Unicom (around 300 million) and China Telecom (around 200 million).
And due to the population, no country of the world, even the US or India has same number of active subscriptions (currently around the 1.3 billion). The MVNO thing has be a failure in China because most of them can’t compete with the state-owned national carriers because together they hold the largest market share.
Xiaomi is a very popular brand in China, so it should be able entice customers with cheaper alternatives and force national carriers to reconsider some of their own offerings. So it is like a win – win situation for the Chinese populace.
Source: Xiaomi
