Even though Xiaomi is still quite young, but the company
that's founded in 2010 is now getting popular and successful with its flagship
smartphones. Although initially Xiaomi only has a market share in China, but in
a short time it has become the 3rd largest smartphone distributor in the world
and now has expanded its market to many countries.
As if not satisfied with all the achievements obtained,
Xiaomi is now expanding its business into the wireless carriers segment or
mobile operator with MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) method. With this
method Xiaomi rents a mobile network capacity from bigger operator companies
and then resell this service under its own branding called Mi Mobile.
Just like other mobile operators that have existed in China
today, Mi Mobile will offer voice and data services for its customers by
utilizing the telecommunications spectrum from bigger operators, Xiaomi chooses
China Telecom and China Unicom as its partners.
Reportedly Mi Mobile will be released for smartphone users
in China, there will be two options offered by Mi Mobile: first package is the
pay-as-you-go, where users will only be charged based on the services used,
either for conversations, text messages or data access. While the second
package uses a subscription fee of 59 Yuan per month for 3GB data access that
comes along with other services.
The release of MVNO service by the non-operator technology
manufacturer is actually not a new thing, previously Google has also launched a
similar service called Project Fi, but this new service can only be enjoyed by
the users of Nexus 6 in US, by cooperating with network operators Sprint and
T-Mobile.
Xiaomi has provided Mi Mobile pay-as-you-go on 23 September
(Chinese time), while the Mi Mobile monthly service will be rolled in the form
of public beta starting in October.
Quoted from VentureBeat, in the beginning of this year
Xiaomi already has 100 million users who use MIUI (Xiaomi's Android-based
firmware) and has sold 61 million devices in 2014, rose from 20 million in
2013.