According to the order previously issued by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, starting from January 15, 2009, Chinese telecommunications operators have implemented unified prices for the short message service, no matter if the message is sent within the network of a single operator or sent across networks of different operators.
The country's three major telecommunications operators, China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, have all announced plans to cancel price differences for SMS from January 15, 2009, and the users will henceforth be charged CNY0.1 for each sent short message. MIIT announced the order on December 3, 2008, and stated that Chinese telecom operators should set a unified price before January 15, 2009 for short messages sent within a network and between different networks.
Reacting to this order, China Mobile Shanghai branch published a notice on December 26, 2008, stating that the company would implement the unified price of CNY0.1 per short message, CNY0.3 per GSM network multimedia message, and CNY0.6 per TD-SCDMA network multimedia message starting from January 1, 2009.
China Unicom Guangdong branch recently said that from January 15, 2009, users of all China Unicom's brands, including World Wind, Ruyi Tong and U-Power, would be charged the unified short message price.
China Telecom Guangdong branch said on January 12, 2009, that from January 15 China Telecom would charge CNY0.1 for each sent short message and the receiving of short message would be free.