Thanks to iPhone 4+WCDMA, China Unicom is really catching up with China Mobile and China Telecom in 3G. But let’s not forget about another fact about China Unicom’s iPhone 4, it has WiFi-enabled, which implied another battle field for the operators, the WiFi hot spots.
By end of 2009, China Telecom has already set up over 100k hot spots across China, and it is said China Mobile would have over 110k hot spots set up by end of 2010; For China Unicom, it has only 25,000 hot spots in 2009 and the figure in 2010 is still far behind other two operators. Obviously the success of iPhone 4+WCDMA brings confidence to China Unicom and it wants to spend more effort promoting its WiFi hot spots in 2011.
From 1st, Jan to 31st March, all China Unicom post-paid users will be able to access its public Wifi hot spots for free. What you need do is to send a text message with ‘TYWLAN’ to 10010 and the login password will be texted back immediately. According to China Unicom, the Wifi access will be unlimited in terms of both the bandwidth and time.