Being a businessman , when you are going to set up china office , buy from china, do wholesale business, you should apply for telephone service.

Making phone calls in and from China has never been easier. Most hotels offer international direct dialing (IDD) and mobile phone networks cover most of the country.

China’s mobile phone networks are run largely by the state-owned China Telecom and China Unicom. China Telecom runs a GSM network which is considered to be the most reliable with the best reception. China Unicom offers a CDMA service with slightly cheaper rates and slightly less wide coverage.

China Mobile also offers a GPRS data network that sits on top of the GSM network and allows computers and PDAs with GPRS capability to connect. Speeds vary from very fast to maddeningly slow, but overall the GPRS service is excellent in all major cities.

If you have a mobile phone from your home country, you should find it connects automatically to a local network. Calls you make will be charged to your home account.

China charges for both phoning out and receiving mobile calls.

Buying a mobile phone
It is almost easier to buy a mobile phone in China than any other consumer item – every city and town has multiple mobile phone shops, as well as the China Mobile and China Unicom stores. There is a huge range of phones available, from the latest Internet-enabled devices with digital cameras to the standard no-frills models. Text messaging can be done in Mandarin via a pinyin (romanization) input system, or in English or other Asian languages, depending on the model.

Prices start at around RMB 600. Nokia and Motorola are the most popular names at the moment. Chinese brands, such as Panda, are well-designed but not yet considered prestigious by the brand-conscious urban Chinese consumer.

Mobile phones in China are typically set for Chinese language display, but can almost always be reset in the options menu for English. This is not generally true with China-sold PDA phones.

Buying a SIM card
Mobile phones are typically sold separate from the network service, so you should separately buy a SIM card which gives you a phone number. If you are in China for an extended period, you can set up a mobile phone account and pay the bill on a monthly basis, though you’ll need a China registered company to sponsor your application. Otherwise stored-value phone cards (also known as “pay as you go”), which are widely available, are very popular. Conveniently, it’s also possible to initially buy a SIM card that is charged using stored-value cards and then register at a later date for that same SIM card to be billed monthly, but again you’ll need your company to support your application.

SIM cards can be bought for prices starting at around RMB 120 RMB and can go up to RMB 1,000 depending on the phone number chosen – phone numbers including several eights and sixes are considered lucky and are sold for a premium (the Chinese words for these numbers sound like the words for plenty and abundance), while four is thought to be unlucky (the Chinese word for four sounds similar to the word for death), providing a discount opportunity.

SIM cards charged using stored-value cards will usually come with RMB 100 worth of credit, and thereafter you will need to recharge manually by buying more charge cards when you need them. These are sold at the China Mobile and China Unicom stores all over the country, and often in supermarkets, post offices, banks and newspaper kiosks in major cities.

Phone charges using a China SIM card are around 0.5 RMB for a local call, 1 RMB for long distance, and (for example) approximately 8 RMB for a one minute call to the US using an IP service.

Don’t forget to bring your mobile phone with you if you’re moving to China for any extended period of time since SIM cards bought in China will work in any standard GSM mobile.

Phone cards
IP cards are the cheapest way to make international calls back home or to head office. These are VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) cards and involve dialing a special five digit number and the code unique to your card before dialing the number you want – instructions are in English and Mandarin. Call rates to Europe are less than RMB 4 per minute, and less than RMB 2.5 to the US.

IP cards are sold all over China, just make sure that their use-by date is still valid and that they can be used anywhere in China. The most reliable IP cards are sold by China Telecom, in post offices, major supermarkets and newspaper kiosks, with a face value of RMB 50 and RMB 100, but usually sold for less.