China

About connectivity in China

China uses 220V/50Hz with Type A, Type C, and Type I outlets — modern Chinese installations typically have a "universal" socket accepting all three. The phone jack is RJ-11. The original Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (MPT) was restructured in 1994, with China Telecom (then later split into northern and southern halves, then re-merged in 2008 with Netcom and Unicom respectively), China Unicom, and China Mobile emerging as the three dominant state-owned carriers. Foreign competition remains tightly limited.

China's commercial Internet opened in October 1995 with China Telecom's CHINANET dial-up service; the academic CSTNET (1994) and CERNET (1995) predated commercial access. Early dial-up was metered over China Telecom PSTN at premium per-minute rates — international gateway capacity was scarce and access was effectively rationed by price. Portal-and-ISP combinations including Sina, Sohu, Netease (NetEase), 263.net, and the regional China Unicom dial-up products competed across the late 1990s. ADSL and cable broadband rolled out aggressively from 2000-2003 and China became the world's largest Internet population by raw subscriber count in the mid-2000s. Consumer dial-up faded faster in tier-1 cities than in inland provinces, where metered access persisted into the late 2000s.

China Telecom's IC-card cardphone network rolled out across major cities from the mid-1990s onward, with chip-based cards in standard denominations sold through China Post outlets, newspaper kiosks, and dedicated telecom shops. The Chinese prepaid international calling-card market through the late 1990s and 2000s was substantial in two directions: outbound diaspora calling from large overseas Chinese communities in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, and Singapore back to mainland family, and inbound foreign-business calling-card use by Western travelers needing local-rate access. China was an early and aggressive adopter of IP card products — prepaid cards routing calls over Internet Protocol backbones at substantially lower per-minute rates than traditional PSTN cards. China Telecom, China Unicom, and dozens of private resellers competed in the IP-card market through the 2000s. Cardphone fleets in major Chinese cities were largely decommissioned through the 2010s as mobile penetration saturated.

Tempest Telecom served China through dial-up POPs in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chengdu, and other major cities. Iridium satphones served energy, NGO, and journalist customers operating in remote western provinces (Xinjiang, Tibet, Inner Mongolia). BGAN terminals supported broadcast crews and corporate logistics in the same regions.

Modern China has the world's largest 5G deployment by base station count, near-universal mobile coverage, and aggressive FTTH rollout led by China Telecom and China Unicom.

Tempest's services across China, 1997–2012

Tempest Telecommunications operated international connectivity services in China between 1997 and 2012 under a unified prepaid account that absorbed multiple service types onto a single customer credential. Customers in China drew from the same balance for pre-paid international voice calling, RADIUS-authenticated dial-up Internet roaming, metered Wi-Fi hotspot access, Iridium satellite voice, and Inmarsat BGAN data terminals. An attempted kiosk-payment federation (PATN, 1998) extended the same architecture to public Internet terminals but failed to reach scale.

Iridium satellite voice was available in China from approximately 2001 (post-bankruptcy relaunch). Thuraya coverage did not extend to China; Inmarsat BGAN data terminals filled the broadband gap from late 2005.

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