I use China Unicom, the cheaper and crappier of China's two mobile telephone network providers. Thus, I am used to having a pretty unreliable service at any time of year. However, around the major holidays, things can become completely unworkable. And I rather doubt if China Mobile is all that much better during this seasonal peak of all seasonal peaks.
The problem is mainly with the SMS system. There are supposedly some 300 million mobile phone users in China (I take these figures with a large pinch of salt, because I don't think they take account of the high rates of multiple phone ownership); and on Chinese New Year's Eve almost all of them are sending dozens of messages of goodwill to friends, neighbours, colleagues, old classmates, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of text messages that people in China attempted to send yesterday ran into the billions.
And the system was completely overwhelmed. I got a number of messages coming through late yesterday evening - after a delay of exactly three hours. Several more came through shortly after dawn this morning, although I surmise that they were sent shortly before midnight last night. Many more, I'm quite sure, simply dropped off the network. The call service wasn't much better: a couple of friends I was trying to hook up with last night reported repeatedly getting a 'busy' message on my line, but I hadn't tried to call anyone all night. It does make it rather difficult to co-ordinate your celebrations when the country's entire telecommunications system breaks down for the day.
It's altogether more socially responsible NOT to send any New Year's text messages at all, I feel.
Mind you, I imagine that any country in the world would suffer similar problems with this kind of peak in traffic. Just how much surplus capacity is there in the networks in Europe or North America, I wonder?
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