China Mobile is currently the world’s largest cellular service provider, having as many as 630 million current subscribers. That’s a freaking huge amount of people. The U.S. population is only 312,502,369 according to the U.S. Census Bureau. With that many subscribers it’s inevitable that a large amount of people are using unauthorized phones on the service. And even though China Mobile hasn’t officially made the iPhone available for use with their service, they’ve reported that there is an estimated 10 million subscribers using unauthorized iPhones on their towers.
10 million is a small number in comparison to how many total China Mobile subscribers there are, but it still shows that there is a want for Apple’s iPhone. It makes us wonder how many more would be in use if it were officially made available for use on China Mobile. Seeing as a deal between Apple and China Mobile is in the works, I’m sure there curious just how many people will adopt the iPhone if it does become official.
Wang Jianzhou, China Mobile’s Chairman, had this to regarding their relationship with Apple.
“We have not yet got agreement with Apple,” Wang said on the fringes of the ITU World telecoms fair in Geneva. “Apple promised to provide, when they develop the iPhone for LTE, that it will include TD-LTE. We are discussing the details.”
With the sheer amount of people that use China Mobile, it’s a surprise that the iPhone hasn’t officially been made available already. It seems as though Apple could have tapped into a much larger user base earlier.