With major global telecom players gathering at ITU World Telecom 2006, an industry jamboree in Hong Kong this week, many people might forget that not so long ago, it was almost impossible to make telephone calls in the Chinese mainland.

But such a harsh memory is still vivid in Lin Yifu's mind, even though China has now grown into the world's largest mobile phone market.

In 1979 when Lin came to the Chinese mainland from Taiwan Province, his birthplace, he found that making telephone calls was extremely annoying.

At that time, "when I tried to call my friends (in Beijing), it often took more than two hours to get through," recalled Lin, who studied in Peking University during 1979 and 1982 and is now one of the best-known economists in the Chinese mainland.

"My friends said they would rather I go to their offices to talk with them in person than wasting time trying to call."

The difficulties stemmed from few telephone users at the time and relatively new technology with a limited capacity.

Fast pace

But things have changed dramatically. In 2001 China became the world's largest mobile market by subscribers. And the growth has not shown signs of slowing down.

By October this year the country had 370 million fixed-line telephone users and 449 million mobile phone subscribers, making the country a lucrative market most telecom players cannot afford to lose.

During the January-October period, 19.7 million new fixed-line users and 55.6 million mobile subscribers were added in the country, according to the Ministry of Information Industry (MII).

The telecom boom has spawned some world-leading operators in China such as China Mobile, which reported an annual revenue of 243 billion yuan (US$30.4 billion) last year. In 2005, the revenue generated from telecom services in the country totalled 577.9 billion yuan (US$72 billion), an increase of 11.7 per cent year-on-year.

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