With its wonderful story and superb performance, the hit drama "Crazy" with a multi-line narrative has been broadcast and has caused heated discussions on the Internet, and as of February 8, the Weibo super topic of "Crazy" has accumulated more than 73 million views. However, unlike other TV series super talk around the plot discussion, the super topic of "Crazy" is more about the discussion of the background setting and props in the play, such as "Gao Qiqiang's same plasma color TV" and "sister-in-law's same coat", and the "young man's first mobile phone" - PHS, which set off many people's common memories.
In "Crazy", in order to reduce the burden on his family, Gao Qisheng, the younger brother of the protagonist Gao Qiqiang, gave up internship opportunities in first-tier cities in the last half of college, chose to "step on the wind of the times", and went home to sell "PHS", and also directly prompted his brother Gao Qiqiang to "earn quick money" because he needed start-up funds, thus starting a plot with Xu Jiang and the Tang brothers. Although the characters in the play took a lot of detours for this PHS store, from the current perspective, opening a PHS store in that era was obviously a bold and smart decision.
Image source: Crazy Racing official Weibo
The reason is also very simple: although there was already a mobile phone business in China at that time, the mobile phone was frighteningly high in terms of hardware costs and communication fees. If you look at it now, the mobile phone of that year seems to be the "Russian tyrant custom pure gold and diamond iPhone" that you will see from time to time on the Internet, and people with heads and faces have not been born with the idea of "buying a mobile phone".
Based on PHS technology, "PHS" attached to traditional cable telephone packages is the first choice for most people to keep in touch. Although the name "PHS" is catchy, but "PHS" is just a product name given by domestic operators, PHS's real name PHS (Personal Handy-phone System, personal handheld telephone system), and GSM network belongs to the second generation of communication system (2G), is a digital mobile communication system.
PHS turned out to be a "foreign monk"
This technology was originally born in NTT Labs in Japan, and was intended to compete with GSM for the mainstream of 2G networks. However, because PHS technology was originally designed for local use habits in Japan, mainly for the market with high population density and low mobility, and such network technology is obviously not suitable for large-scale promotion on a global scale, the dominance of the 2G network standard eventually fell to the GSM standard, although the PHS standard also belongs to the 2G network, but only as a supplement to the specific market.
In Chinese mainland, PHS services are provided by two operators, China Telecom and China Netcom, of which Netcom exclusively operates PHS services in Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shandong and other provinces and cities, while China Telecom exclusively operates the business in other provinces and cities. Why do I keep using PHS here instead of the more accessible "PHS"?
This is actually related to Xiaolei's own experience when he was a child: in most provinces and cities in China, PHS is called PHS; But in some cities, PHS has other names, such as "Quanlingtong" and "Shitongtong". And because of the bad taste of his childhood, Xiaolei always called "City Dialect" "X Digging" when he was a child, which can be said to be very naïve.
Image source: https://lists.gnu.org
But in any case, under the promotion of China Telecom and China Netcom, the real domestic spread began to be "PHS", the name taken from the science fiction novel "PHS Roaming the Future", PHS has also accompanied tens of millions of domestic users since 2000 to the unknown 21st century.
In the TV series, Gao Qisheng completed personal capital accumulation under Gao Qiqiang's "resource tilt", and made PHS his own "monopoly business". In fact, the period from 2000 to 2006 was indeed a period of rapid development for PHS. Just like in the TV series, PHS's core communication selling point is only one - cheap.
A real "price butcher"
Since PHS technology entered the 2G standard as a supplement to GSM technology, PHS initially targeted markets that GSM services could not cover. The coverage here naturally refers not to the coverage of the signal level, but to the coverage of the market and user groups.
Limited by technology and patents, GSM mobile phones in those years were usually only imported or smuggled models of overseas brands, and overseas models naturally did not consider the economic development and consumption level of the Chinese market, so the price of mobile phones from any source was not cheap. In addition, due to the independent system of local operators, the communication fee of GSM mobile phones is also relatively expensive. Mobile phones will only be used when necessary, and landlines are still the first choice for everyone to call.
In this case, the advantages of PHS are manifested. As I just said, PHS technology was aimed at a high population density and low liquidity market at the beginning, which coincided with the rhythm of domestic urban development at that time. The operating frequency band of PHS technology is 1880-1930MHz, while the GSM frequency band commonly used in Asian countries is 900MHz. In addition, the transmission power of PHS base stations is also an order of magnitude smaller than that of GSM, CDMA and other standard base stations, usually only 10mW, so the signal coverage of PHS single base stations is also smaller than GSM, so construction and operating costs are also lower.
So how to solve the characteristics of PHS signal range is small? This is why PHS systems such as PHS are suitable for the "high-density, low-flow" market, high density means that a single base station can cover more user groups, and low liquidity means that operators can reduce the number of base station construction, thereby reducing overall operating costs. Such network operators coincided with the development process of domestic urbanization at that time, coupled with the reduction of operating costs, so operators were more willing to promote PHS.
Image credit: Veer
More importantly, at that time, PHS in the mainland strictly restricted the use area, so the supplementary PHS did not affect the number of users of "high-end users" of GSM mobile phones, in modern terms, "accurately sinking the market without weakening the first-line competitiveness", which can be said to be a model of win-win (operators win twice).
In addition, PHS also had a selling point that was very much in line with the context of the times: at that time, Chinese mainland was just beginning to contact overseas technology companies, and was both curious and afraid of new technologies. When everyone looks at mobile phones with such a mentality, radiation becomes a topic that cannot be bypassed.
But PHS is different. As just said, the transmission power of the base station of PHS technology is lower than that of the common GSM base station, and from the technical level, the radiation is indeed lower. So operators have branded PHS with low radiation, supplemented by the publicity and promotion of demonized radiation, PHS's low tariff and low radiation quickly grasped the core pain points of users, and PHS also successfully found its own living space under the dominance of GSM.
Image source: Sohu
Of course, such propaganda also has its own shortcomings, such as the leader who clapped the propaganda manuscript in 2003 for "experts believe that the radiation of "PHS" is much lower than that of ordinary mobile phones" would never have imagined that his alarmism would bring such great resistance to the construction of 5G base stations 20 years later. Of course, these are already afterwords, under the propaganda of alarmism and deception, PHS has accumulated a large number of users in a short period of time, and the number of users in 2006 was even close to 100 million.
Why is PHS not good and informed?
As just said, PHS is characterized by low tariff, low radiation and low operating costs. But such characteristics have also become the shortcoming of PHS. When deciding to write the topic of PHS this morning, Xiaolei's colleague said in the group a smooth sentence to describe PHS: holding PHS, standing in the wind and rain, left hand hitting right hand, just can't get through.
Image source: Ray Technology
And the short board of poor signal is indeed accompanied by PHS's life.
First of all, PHS is essentially PHS network equipment, and compared with GSM signals, the high PHS frequency also makes PHS very easy to be blocked by obstacles like the current 5G signal. As a "competitor" of GSM, PHS mobile phones are absolutely impossible to support a more stable GSM network, which leads to the signal of PHS devices being very "casual".
Image credit: Veer
On the other hand, the low power and small coverage of PHS base stations also make PHS operators need to increase investment and build a denser PHS base station network. However, it is clear that the operators at that time did not have such a high level of awareness, and the sparse signal coverage of PHS obviously could not meet the communication needs of the majority of PHS users.
However, for the sake of PHS's cheapness, coupled with the fact that everyone's demand for calling is not so high, the domestic PHS network is so fooled. This passable operational attitude continued into 2010, until the arrival of 3G networks.
In the novel "Crazy", Gao Qisheng clearly mentioned that he "hundreds of thousands of PHS units fell into his hands" because "3G rushed into the market at once, and PHS's cellular base stations were canceled... No one wants to give it away for nothing! In fact, the disappearance of PHS in the mainland is indeed related to 3G, but it is not the same as everyone thinks: the disappearance of PHS is not because 3G is better than PHS, but represents PHS network PHS, whether it wants to make way for 3G or not.
How 3G is "replaced" PHS
If you have experienced the 3G era, you should know that 3G is an important turning point in the mainland telecommunications industry. In the 2G era, because the relevant patents of the three major standards of GSM, PHS and CDMA are not in their hands, the mainland telecommunications market can only be seized by overseas giants. In order to change this situation, we have proposed TD-SCDMA (hereinafter referred to as TD standard) network standard in the 3G era.
The relevant departments have high hopes for the TD-SCDMA standard, hoping that this standard can compete with W-CDMA, so they have placed a lot of support resources on the TD standard, and even directly assigned the TD standard to China Mobile, which had the largest number of mobile phone customers at that time, hoping that China Mobile could lead TD to the world. The rest of China Telecom and China Unicom control CDMA2000 and W-CDMA networks respectively.
However, because the mainland smartphone industry has just started in the 3G era, most of the overseas brand mobile phones on the market are W-CDMA as the 3G standard, and China Mobile has even cooperated with mobile phone brands to launch a large number of so-called (mobile) mobile phones, and promote TD mobile phones in the form of price subsidies. However, the problem arises at this time, the PHS network frequency band used in the mainland may cause interference to the TD standard, so the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology directly asked China Telecom and China Unicom (China Netcom merged into China Unicom in 2008) to end PHS network services by the end of 2011 at the latest to make way for the TD standard.
Image source: Baidu Encyclopedia
At this time, PHS, which relies on PHS networks, has also changed from a small helper with low radiation, low tariffs and promoting the popularization of telecommunications networks overnight to a historical burden that hinders the development of telecommunications networks. However, because the number of PHS users is too large, it is not realistic to stop PHS services before 2011, so the PHS limit has been delayed again and again, and it was not until 2014 that PHS networks began to be closed in various places, and PHS was officially offline in the mainland.
However, this is obviously not a problem that needs to be considered for the high rise of crime in order to fill the pit, and everyone understands the truth of Skynet's recovery and not leakage, and it is not emphasized here.
However, what is surprising is that although PHS has left the market dismally in the mainland, PHS networks have developed differently in their "hometown" Japan. For medical reasons, the network in Japanese hospitals is strictly restricted, but doctors and nurses have communication needs in hospitals, so "low-radiation" PHS comes in handy. In the early years of medical-themed Japanese dramas, we often saw doctors and nurses with a red lanyard around their necks and the word PHS printed on them. There is no doubt that this is indeed the "half-half-brother" of the domestic PHS.
Who will be the next PHS?
Let's stop the story of PHS. Although PHS has been away from us for a long time, we in the 5G era can often see the "PHS" around us.
Taking 5G networks as an example, from a certain point of view, 5G is indeed somewhat similar to PHS: the signals of both are easily occluded, the coverage of a single base station is not large, and even most people are reluctant to use it. But from another perspective, our vigorous development of 5G network, the ultimate goal is to ensure our voice in the world.
In 2000, everyone was full of curiosity about the outside world, but due to economics and technology, we could not speak internationally like developed countries, let alone have a voice. This also leads to the need to use foreign "backup technology" as the main force, and use PHS networks designed for small areas to build and improve domestic telecommunications infrastructure. At the same time, mobile phone devices sold domestically must also pay high patent fees overseas.
Image credit: Veer
However, in the 5G era, we can already export 5G infrastructure to overseas markets and provide 5G technology to foreign countries just as we introduced PHS networks. In other words, we have gone from being the earliest users to being standard-setters. The most direct feeling brought about by the identity change is naturally the decline in the cost of communication equipment.
It is foreseeable that one day in the future, 5G will be replaced by 6G and 7G technology. But by then, we will no longer need to look at the face of this overseas monopoly giant, we can use our own technology and strength to benefit the world, and the phenomenon of "picking substitutes that others do not want as our main force" will no longer exist.
Farewell, PHS of the past, present and future.