Shenzhen has been chosen by the Central Government as one of the country's 12 cities for trials of merged phone, Internet and television networks, according to a statement posted on its Web site Thursday (July 1).
The other cities are Beijing, Shanghai, Harbin, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Qingdao, Xiamen, Dalian, Mianyang and the Changsha-Xiangtan-Zhuzhou area of Hunan Province, the statement said.
However, the statement gave no schedule and did not elaborate on the development of the program.
The program aims to make the three systems compatible and allow users to make telephone calls, surf the Internet and watch television via one cable or wireless portal.
Currently, TV, telecom and Internet networks are separate in China, and different operators provide access to cable TV, telecommunications and the Internet.
On Jan 13, the State Council issued a new policy that plans to push forward the merger of China's media networks into a single force combining telephone services, Internet, TV and radio broadcasting by 2015.
Network convergence was first proposed as early as 1998, but its implementation has proved slow.
"This is mainly because the interests of different departments could not be balanced, so the talk of network convergence was largely empty words," Fu Liang, an independent senior telecommunications analyst, said.
In other words, the parties cared only about capturing others' slice of the cake and were unwilling to open up their own market. The telecommunications and broadcasting industries each have their own complete industry chain made up of networks, terminal devices, business models and the provision of content. Network convergence will inevitably break the existing market structure and create a new competitive landscape for the industries, according to Fu.
Network convergence has been under way for more than 10 years in developed countries such as Britain and the United States.
