Subscribers welcome caller-pays

Mobile phone subscribers in Guangdong Province will no longer pay for incoming calls as of Thursday, thanks to a new billing scheme introduced by operators.

Subscribers will be jumping for joy at this news, but the caller-pays scheme is nothing unusual in other parts of the country. In recent years, operators in many regions, especially in small cities, have introduced de facto one-way charging schemes.

Many of these moves were opposed by the regulators. The Ministry of Information Industry fined some defiant operators in a bid to block the introduction of one-way charging under a government-set system.