Iphones without WiFI in China
WiFi will be disabled; Chinese buyers wont get full features of the iPhone
China Unicom will start selling iPhones in China around October this year. However, iPhones sold in China will not have WiFi. It is also possible that the iPhones in China will not be able to access the iTunes Music Store, nor make full use of the iPhone app store. For all practical purposes, it will be a ‘handicapped’ iPhone that China Unicom will be selling in China. It is not clear whether WiFi in iPhones will disabled with a software, or whether the chip itself will be removed. In the first case, it may not be difficult for techies to unlock the iPhone with hacking software.
China’s WiFi rules are different from those in other countries. In China, wireless equipment (like mobile phones and laptops) must use devices which conform to WAPI (WLAN Authentication and Privacy Infrastructure). This means that mobile phones like BlackBerrys and iPhones with WiFi transmitters-recievers will need to conform to standards in it before it can be legally used. WAPI, a Chinese-developed standard, has no acceptance outside China, and handset makers prefer to release their phones without WiFi in China rather than bother to incorporate WAPI.
This could be major discouragement for China Unicom subscribers who have been waiting for the iPhone and its WiFi capabilities ever since it was launched. In North America and Europe, most iPhone users rely heavily on WiFI networks for data transfer, and the lack of such networks to promote its App Store could be a point of disappointment for Apple as well. Unicom has not announced the price of iPhones in China. Surely it must cost less than what it costs abroad, since it comes with fewer features?
Why doesn’t foreign handset makers like Apple, which makes iPhone, use WAPI in their phones? The reason is that many foreign mobile phone manufacturers and technical organisations fear that WAPI could have a ‘backdoor’ through which organs of the Chinese government and the Communist Party can spy into the phone. This suspicion is accentuated by the fact only 24 Chinese companies make WAPI-compliant devices. On top of it, Chinese technical organisations have never released the complete algorithms for WAPI to the International Standards Organisation. The last time China submitted the WAPI protocol to ISO for international acceptance, the ISO rejected it. China is planning to make another submission in the near future.
Iphones without WiFI is bad enough for Chinese mobile phone users, but what about the iPhone app store? It seems Chinese buyers wont be able to make full use of the iPhone App store either. This is because app store downloads above 10 MB need a WiFI network for downloads. Many apps in the popular App Store are above 10 MB, and users in the West download such content over WiFi networks, which are common. Even in the US, this 10 MB cap is an annoyance, and users feel that they should be allowed to download any content over 3G networks as long as they pay for it. It was only recently that Apple lifted the 10 MB limit on download for podcasts. In China, since the iPhone will be released with Wfi disabled, users will not be able to download 10 MB-plus apps from the App Store unless Apple allows such data transfers over 3G networks only for Chinese users.
There are many applications available now, which can be installed on the iPhone (3G Unrestrictor is one example) which fools the iPhone into thinking that the data transfer is happening across WiFi, even when it is over 3G. Installing such applications may be one short cut for those Chinese users who do not want to miss out on many exciting Apps from the Apple store.