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Telecom in China

Now that I’ve gotten my resident permit in China, I finally taking care of some administrative business. First up, I am getting a China Mobile Phone account on one of the big networks in China. The good news is that I will finally be able to Periscope and Live Tweet from around town and the rest of China. The bad news is that I had to pay off my US Mobile account. It looks like I will be able to press pause on my US account with no issues for about 6 months and then resume paying my normal account fees. I might just keep the line active for now and see how this China account goes as I do not want to end up not having a working phone anywhere…

Of course there is a massive language barrier at most of the telecom places so this could end up being entertaining. When I tried to get my iPhone 4 to work on China Unicom, I spent an hour and got nowhere as it would not activate on the network. I should have better luck with my 6 and I have a few different options for carriers. I just want the one with the most data possible (especially for Periscope, Instagramming and iMessages).

Other than my rather limited social media interactions, things are going well here in China and the other day, I had a better idea of where we were going than the taxi driver. I am also looking forward to my first trip. Looks like it will either be to Macau or to Kyoto Japan. I’m leaning towards Macau since it’s technically country #32 and it’s much cheaper. Certain flights to Japan from Shanghai are just as expensive as they are from the US. That’s messed up since Japan is only about a 2.5 hour flight.