Ministry of Industry and Information Technology: Cancellation of data "roaming" fees will be implemented as scheduled in 2018

The State Council executive meeting on April 4 clearly stated that starting from July 1, 2018, telecom companies must cancel data "roaming" fees.

On the morning of April 25, the State Council Information Office held a press conference on the development of the industrial communications industry in the first quarter. A reporter asked: "This year's Government Work Report proposed to cancel data roaming fees, and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also clearly stated that the time is July 1. What is the current progress? Can it be successfully completed before July 1?"

Wen Ku, director of the Information and Communications Development Department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said at the meeting: "According to our current understanding, enterprises are working overtime and in parallel. In this regard, I can tell you that it is achievable."

Wen Ku said that in order to implement the goal of reducing fees by 30% as set out in the Government Work Report, basic telecommunications companies have sorted out the following measures:

• Increase the launch of unlimited or high-volume data plans. Some companies have upgraded local data to national data in their newly launched packages.
• We will expand the capacity and reduce the fees of data packages, launch preferential sales for mainstream packages, give users a certain amount of communication fees, and further expand the capacity of some of the data included in the packages.
• Based on some characteristics of user usage, we launch some traffic products, continuously enrich the existing Internet traffic products, and continue to launch monthly traffic packages, holiday traffic packages, and daily traffic packages to lower the threshold for traffic consumption.
• We promote services that allow users to use data with confidence, automatically add preferential data packages when the data usage exceeds the limit, and remind users of their data usage in a timely manner when the limit is approaching. This is what we know about the work done by enterprises in achieving the 30% target.

Wen Ku also added that in terms of home broadband, the company will continue to implement preferential home broadband and launch preferential broadband tariff plans. In particular, it will carry out some speed increases without price increases and increase the promotion of fixed convergence packages. In terms of broadband private lines for small and medium-sized enterprises, the company will further reduce the price of private lines, which is expected to drop by 10% to 15% this year. It has also launched some special products for some small and medium-sized enterprises to support their "double innovation".

"In terms of network speed-up, we have also done a series of promotion work. This year we will further promote the increase in user broadband speed. Our guiding goal this year is to hope that more than half of home broadband users can use broadband speeds of more than 100 megabits. At the same time, some users have been concerned about the issue of upstream speeds in the past period of time. We will also promote this work this year. In the first half of the year, we will issue relevant upstream speed standards." Wen Ku said.