If you live in a major Chinese city, the image above probably looks pretty familiar. Traffic congestion is just a fact of life in cities like Beijing, where the city’s five-million-plus car owners attempt to squeeze past each other on streets that simply aren’t wide enough to handle the volume of traffic. As anyone who’s spent a few hours stewing in the haze of a stopped-dead traffic jam on one of Beijing’s byways will tell you, it’s no fun.
But now China’s major – and majorly crowded – cities are facing another kind of traffic congestion: mobile traffic. Last night, for example, 3G services for many of China Unicom’s users went offline. Most users within Beijing’s fourth ring road (a highly populated area of roughly 78 square miles) were unable to access the web for a period of around two hours, during which its customer service phone lines were reportedly ringing off the hook.
The culprit, according to China Unicom, was a spike in user data usage. In other words, a traffic jam. In fact, Unicom’s Weibo post on the outage actually uses yongse, a Chinese word often used in the context of road traffic congestion, to describe the cause of the downtime.
Unicom says it has already tweaked its traffic optimization and restored normal service, but this isn’t likely to be the last such incident China’s telecoms have to deal with. China’s mobile internet user numbers are climbing at a remarkable rate – the country gained nearly 200 million new 3G users in the year 2013. And more than half of China still has yet to come online at all. Over the next decade, as more people buy smartphones and more smartphone owners start connecting to 3G and 4G data services, Chinese telecoms are going to see their systems severely tested.
Telecoms can expand their infrastructure much more easily than the roads of Beijing can be expanded, of course. But yesterday’s service outage indicates that the pace of user adoption may be tough to keep up with. Moreover, as users get used to having access to the web 24-7, outages and slowdowns are likely to become more costly. A glance at China Unicom’s Weibo comments is all it takes to see that plenty of Unicom’s Beijing users want compensation for Monday’s downtime. And businesses that make sales through mobile channels are stuck with losses too; two hours without China Unicom data services likely translated into a bit of lost revenue for Beijing’s taxi apps, for example.
As China continues to get more mobile, its 3G and 4G subscribers grow, and more businesses come to rely on their customers having 24-7 access to the web, the stakes of these “mobile internet traffic jams” are only going to get higher. But here’s hoping that five years from now, Beijing’s mobile data services don’t look as crowded as its rush-hour streets do today.
See: Controversy as Shanghai plans to ban taxi apps that show rider’s destination
This post As mobile usage grows, China’s traffic jams aren’t just a problem for car owners anymore appeared first on Tech in Asia.
As mobile usage grows, China’s traffic jams aren’t just a problem for car owners anymore
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