Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Recently, a domestic TV series called "the Wind" has become popular all over the network. I believe everyone has seen it.

In the play, there is a communication term. I don't know if all of you here have noticed it.

Yes, this noun is "PHS".

Gao Qiqiang, the protagonist of the series, was originally a fish seller, but after listening to his brother's persuasion, he turned to PHS. Later, Gao Qiqiang turned black, and his younger brother Gao Qisheng continued to sell. As a result, he threw it in his hand and lost a lot of money. In the end, Gao Qisheng was forced to sell drugs to pay his debts, and from then on he embarked on the road of crime.

It can be said that PHS has completely changed the fate of the Gao brothers, and it is also a key element to promote the development of the plot.

For many post-00 viewers, they may not know PHS. Many viewers before 00 may not remember exactly what PHS is.

In today's article, Xiao Zaojun will lead you to review its story again.

The birth of █ in 1978, Children's Publishing House published a science fiction novel called PHS roaming the Future.

The author of this novel is Mr. Ye Yonglie, a famous writer. He completed the work in 1961, but it has not been published because of well-known reasons of the times.

In the first year of reform and opening up, the novel was finally published. After publication, it quickly caused a huge sensation, the initial printing reached 3 million copies, and became the eternal childhood memories of the post-70s and 80s.

In the book, the protagonist named "PHS" is a clever and lovely little reporter. He roams the world of the future and has all kinds of miraculous experiences.

Who would have thought that 20 years later, the word "PHS" would unexpectedly reappear.

In January 1998, Zhejiang Yuhang Telecommunication Bureau officially launched PHS service. This is a half-cell phone and half-fixed-line business. The reason for this is that it looks like a mobile phone, but it uses a fixed-line telephone network.

The birth of PHS has its unique historical background.

At that time, mobile and telecommunications were separated, and mobile had mobile communication services, and the momentum of development was rapid. As for telecommunications, the Ministry of Information Industry does not give it a wireless communications license, so it can only watch the mobile get rich and count the money.

Telecom, which is also burdened with the pressure of profit growth, certainly will not just sit idly by. So it has been trying to find opportunities.

On one occasion, Xu Fuxin, director of the Yuhang Telecommunications Bureau under Zhejiang Telecom, went to Japan for an inspection. When he saw the PHS technology, he immediately felt like a treasure-- "Hey, doesn't this just meet our needs?"

Xu Fuxin, PHS, was not called by his name when he was in Japan at that time. Its original name is PHS, or Personal Handy-phone System, which is a personal handheld radiotelephone system.

PHS belongs to the second generation communication technology, and also belongs to the WLL technology (Wireless Local Loop, wireless local loop). It realizes wireless coverage through the micro-cell base station, and connects the user terminal (that is, wireless local mobile phone) to the local fixed telephone network (PSTN) wirelessly, so that the traditional fixed telephone is no longer "fixed", but can be used freely within the coverage area of the wireless network.

To put it bluntly, it's a bit like an enhanced version of a cordless phone.

Hello? Xiao Li. This technology is actually developed in Japan behind closed doors and is not popular at home and is known as the "beehive of the poor". It is mainly because the coverage of its base station is very small, so it is easy to have poor signal effect, but the advantage lies in the low cost.

At that time, it was precisely because it was based on a fixed telephone network, so strictly speaking, it was not mobile communication technology, so it met the needs of telecommunications (Telecom did not have a mobile communication license).

When it comes to PHS, we have to mention a company, that is, UT Starcom.

In 1995, UT UTstarcom was founded in the United States by Wu Ying.

Wu Ying's iconic beard may still be remembered as Wu Ying, who saw the business opportunities of PHS technology and hit it off with Xu Fuxin, and decided to make every effort to introduce PHS technology to China. At that time, UT Starcom spent tens of millions of dollars on the technology. The name "PHS" was given by Xu Fuxin (Xu is also known as the "father of PHS").

At that time, the name PHS belonged exclusively to UT Starcom PHS products (obtained the free authorization of Mr. Ye Yonglie). Later, it was because the name was easy to remember that it gradually became a "nickname" for PHS technology, and all manufacturers called it. UT Starcom simply let it go and gave up exclusive ownership of the name.

The advantages and disadvantages of █ let's take a detailed look at the characteristics of PHS.

As mentioned earlier, PHS is called "the beehive of the poor" in Japan.

Its construction cost is much lower than the traditional 2G (GSM). The cost is low, so the fee is very cheap.

Just like the PHS service first launched by Yuhang Telecom: one-way charge, free to answer, 20 yuan per month, and only 0.2 yuan per minute for calls.

The tariff was sensational at the time, much lower than that of China Mobile and China Unicom (only about 1Accord 5), and basically similar to the fixed-line business. In addition, the price of PHS mobile phone (actually a wireless local phone terminal, for convenience, hereinafter referred to as mobile phone) is also very cheap, only a few hundred yuan, so it attracts a large number of users to handle and use it.

In addition to the fees, PHS also had some significant advantages in PHS advertisements at that time:

Environmental protection

Environmental protection is a great advantage of PHS. The power of PHS terminal is only 10mW, while the general 2G terminal is about 1W. PHS base station power 500MW GSM 2G base station is 20W. Therefore, if you use PHS to make a phone call, you won't feel that the phone is hot or dizzy like GSM.

Low radiation is the selling point of PHS precisely because of this feature. At that time, many hospitals in Japan did not allow the use of GSM phones, but only PHS phones were allowed.

Similarly, low power makes PHS phones have a much longer standby time than ordinary phones.

32kbit / s ADPCM coding technology is adopted in PHS speech communication with good sound quality, which is an improvement of traditional 64kbit / s PCM coding technology. The amount of data is reduced to 1max 2 of traditional PCM, but the effect is about the same. As a result, the sound quality of PHS is not much different from that of landlines and is better than other 2G phones.

The delay time is short, the coverage radius of PHS base station is small, the design and processing mode of wireless interface is different from the traditional 2G, and the delay time is relatively smaller.

After talking about the advantages, let's take a look at the disadvantages.

Although low power gives PHS many advantages, it inevitably brings a fatal defect-poor signal.

PHS users often encounter signal problems, and there were a lot of jokes about PHS at that time. For example, some people call PHS a "Hello cao" phone, because when it is used, it is always "Hello?! … Hello?!. Cao!" .

Some people also made up a poem to satirize: "take PHS and stand in the wind and rain." the left hand for the right hand, still can not get through. "

This can be seen from the difference in signal.

In fact, although PHS's user experience in Japan is not good, it is not as bad as in China. Mainly because most of the houses in Japan are wooden structures, so to some extent, the signal attenuation is not so great.

█ rapid development period anyway, China Telecom has no other choice, only PHS this card, need to rely on it to recover the decline.

In fact, at that time, telecommunications bureaus all over the country adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Not only does the telecommunications bureau wait and see, but the attitude of the equipment manufacturers is also very vague.

Several equipment companies, including Huawei and Ericsson, carefully evaluated PHS technology and decided that it was too backward to have any future, so they chose to give up. Apart from UT Starcom, only ZTE and Lucent decided to follow up.

It is policy that can really determine the fate of PHS. If the policy is banned, it will be useless no matter how strong the will of telecommunications is.

Telecom insists that PHS is a fixed-line telephone technology, while Mobile believes that it is a mobile communication technology, which is a "violation". The two sides went back and forth and quarreled.

In June 2000, the former Ministry of Information Industry issued a notice positioning PHS as a "supplement and extension of fixed telephone", which marked a loosening of the policy restricting the development of PHS.

As a result, local telecom has launched PHS service one after another.

In August 2002, PHS opened in more than 200 prefectures and cities on Chinese mainland, with a system capacity of 11 million lines and more than 6 million users.

At that time, PHS service was basically opened all over the country except Beijing and Shanghai.

In March 2003, Wu Jichuan, former minister of information industry, told the media that the policy towards PHS was "not to encourage non-interference".

In the same month, PHS officially broke through Beijing by releasing its account in Huairou District of Beijing.

In February 2004, PHS successfully broke through Shanghai. So far, the opening of the whole country has been realized.

At the same time, the number of PHS users is growing by leaps and bounds--

April 2004, 47 million.

September 2005, 81.275 million.

In October 2006, it reached its historical peak in 93.41 million.

For a time, PHS became a household name in China. Many ordinary people, especially the elders at home, have handled and used PHS business.

█ is bound to decline when it comes to falling things, and PHS, who reached its peak, unwittingly ushered in an inflection point of its own destiny.

In fact, UT Starcom's inflection point came earlier.

When PHS first broke out, UT Starcom made a lot of money.

In March 2000, UT Starcom Holdings was successfully listed on NASDAQ. On the day of landing, the share price soared to $73, or 278%, and the company's market capitalization swelled to more than $7 billion.

In its heyday, PHS brought $2.593 billion in annual revenue to UT Starcom. At one point, the market capitalization of UT Starcom surpassed that of IT giant Cisco.

In 2003, UT Starcom Holdings was selected as one of the top 100 IT enterprises by BusinessWeek, an authoritative American magazine.

In 2005, it was ranked as one of the top 20 most successful small businesses in the world by Forbes magazine.

How popular was PHS at that time? Operators from all over the country came to block the doors of manufacturers, asking them to give priority to supply, and even giving gifts to factory leaders. Such a thing is unthinkable now.

In addition to UT Starcom, ZTE also relied on the huge profits contributed by PHS, and the gap between turnover and Huawei narrowed to only 5 billion (thanks to CDMA, of course).

UT Starcom is crazy to make money, and its founder, Wu Ying, is also very popular.

At that time, Wu Ying frequently appeared in the spotlight, participated in various meetings and interviews, and often appeared on the covers of newspapers and magazines.

This iconic photo has become history. However, since 2005, UT Starcom has embarked on the road of decline.

Although the number of PHS users is still growing, the company's share of revenue from PHS business is declining, to 32% from 79% in 2004, and the company lost $430 million for the whole year.

Since then, UT Starcom has lost money for six years in a row.

In 2008, in the third round of split and reorganization of operators, Telecom finally obtained a formal mobile communications license and bought the CDMA network from China Unicom.

With the new darling of CDMA, Telecom certainly will not attach importance to the old love of PHS.

As a result, telecom investment in PHS continues to decline, coupled with the continuous reduction of mobile phone charges by major operators, the competitiveness of PHS has declined significantly, and the number of users has begun to decline significantly.

In May 2008, the number of Chinese mainland PHS users fell below 80 million.

To make matters worse, the frequency band used by PHS affected the "domestic standard" TD-SCDMA, which was highly valued by the state at that time. Therefore, its fate is doomed to be terminated early.

In February 2009, the government authorities explicitly required that all wireless access systems in the 1900-1920MHz band (that is, the PHS band) be de-netted by the end of 2011 to ensure that there is no harmful interference to the 1880-1900MHz band TD-SCDMA system.

This means that PHS must withdraw from the net completely by 2011.

Although there are policy requirements for █ to withdraw from the Internet, in fact, the road for PHS to withdraw from the Internet is very bumpy.

At that time, there was PHS business, in addition to China Telecom, there was also China Unicom (China Telecom North Netcom, in 2008, Netcom was merged into Unicom).

At first, the two operators thought it would be easier to withdraw from the network, but later found that it was as difficult as demolition.

Why?

From the user's point of view, put aside the cheap factors (operators will provide subsidies), the network often need to go to the business hall to go through the formalities, changing the number is also very troublesome. This is a very reluctant thing for many users.

Many PHS users have sued China Unicom and China Telecom to continue to provide PHS services and ensure the quality of service, which has formed the pressure of public opinion on the operators.

For operators, the regulatory authorities implement a strict complaint rate assessment mechanism, so that operators can not force PHS users to change networks.

Therefore, the complete withdrawal of PHS was not completed on time in 2011.

It took another three years, and it was not until October 1, 2014 that all PHS base stations were finally shut down. The PHS business has completely disappeared.

█ 's last words were launched in 1998, peaked in 2006, and then retired in 2014. PHS has survived in China for a total of 16 years. Its good days come and end quickly, just like a roller coaster.

Its fate, doomed from the very beginning, is a product for short-term transition.

Generally speaking, PHS has fulfilled its historical mission.

By making use of it, Telecom has accumulated the operation experience of mobile communications, trained a lot of early mobile communication users, and thus avoided the further expansion of the gap with mobile. Although the investment is not cheap, it is worth it.

On the contrary, UT Starcom, on the equipment side, is very disappointing.

In fact, from the beginning, UT Starcom and Wu Ying knew very well that PHS was not a long-term solution. However, they still overestimated the life cycle of PHS, acted slowly, and missed the most appropriate time for transformation.

Moreover, UT Starcom's transformation strategy is also a failure. Although it has tried to invest in 3G, IPTV and other services, the overall strategy is rash and disorganized, and does not form competitiveness. In the face of Ericsson, Huawei and other traditional telecommunications giants, the opportunity is fleeting, how can you hesitate.

The end of the bearded Wu Ying is also sad. He walked out of the halo, after the fierce differences and struggles within UT Starcom, he left sadly and disappeared from the public view.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: fresh Jujube classroom (ID:xzclasscom), author: Xiaozaojun

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