What's good enough for China Mobile seems to be good enough for its rival China Unicom.

The latter company is following its rival who announced they are removing roaming fees and services in the coming months.

Starting October 1, China Unicom will cancel domestic long-distance charges and roaming charges, said China Unicom's Chairman Wang Xiaochu at the company's 2016 interim results conference.

When its 3G business was promoted four years ago, China Unicom had already cancelled the long-distance charges for its mainstream packages. At present, only 4% of China Unicom users still have long-distance charges, and cancelling this charge has little impact on China Unicom's revenue.

According to Wang Xiaochu, it is the global trend to decrease monthly charges for mobile phones. China Unicom's future development goal is to subdivide user groups and the company's charges will be more targeted.

China Telecom also already expressed plans to cancel domestic long-distance charges and roaming charges within this year. China Telecom took the initiative to implement full flow billing, which means dialing and SMS charges will be converted into the unified flow charges.

The hardest time for China Unicom is about to be passed, and China Unicom is expected to harvest satisfactory results in this year's revenue and maintain good momentum next year, Wang Xiaochu said.

According to financial reports, China Unicom’s revenues in the first half of 2016 was CNY140.26 billion, a decline of 3.1%; its net profit is CNY1.43 billion, a decline of 79.6%. Despite such declines, its overall profits are greatly improved. In the second half of last year, China Unicom actually lost CNY336 million after profits of iron assets were eliminated.