China Telecom customers in Guangdong stranded in 2G shutdown

China Telecom's 2G customers in Guangdong province have been left stranded by its network shutdown. The provincial telco branch Guangdong Telecom has been progressively switching off its old CDMA 2G network since the beginning of the year — but does not seem to have imparted that information to its small customer base.

A number of 2G users in the southern province have been sounding off on social media that their old phone has been reduced to "a brick." One complained that his device had worked perfectly for years before suddenly going dead. When he contacted Guangdong Telecom he was told he had to upgrade his package and get a new phone.

After a few days of headlines, Guangdong Telecom issued a statement Wednesday advising that it was "deploying a new generation of communication network infrastructure" across the province and as a result would be withdrawing 2G services.

Figure 1:



Lack of communication has left customers in a crunch, not for the first time.


(Source: Newscom / Alamy Stock Photo)

It says 2G customers can keep their old phone numbers, and have the choice of a 4G/5G package or their current plan, but they have to buy a new device – a challenge for many of these users who tend to be old and on limited incomes.

Another Guangdong Telecom incident

"If some products cannot continue to be used, an assurance plan will be provided," the statement added, without explaining what the 'assurances' will be.

It is not clear how many customers have been affected. Chinese operators have not disclosed 2G subscriber numbers for years. According to MIIT figures, the three telcos supported 273 million 2G users in May 2020, although the vast majority were on China Mobile. Only around 10% were China Telecom or China Unicom customers.

In the intervening three years the operators have made efforts to move people off 2G and 3G, offering some of the world's lowest 5G rates.

At a guess, it may be that no more than a few hundred thousand people have been affected by the closure of the old 800MHz network in wealthy Guangdong. So it is not a crisis. But it does suggest that customer communication is not a core competency at Guangdong Telecom.

The subsidiary hit the headlines in June when the provincial mobile network crashed, taking out tens of millions of customers for five hours. The outage, which affected voice and VoLTE calls, was said to be the result of network congestion – or maybe not. The telco has yet to provide an explanation to its customers or the wider public.

Guangdong Telecom seems to have developed an unhappy knack of getting into trouble and not being able to explain its way out of it.

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— Robert Clark, Contributing Editor, special to Light Reading