A total of over 490,000 phone calls were made on the country’s GSM network, in and around the Beijing National Stadium, on the eve of the Opening and Closing ceremonies for Olympics. Before you start making remarks about the Chinese, the report goes on to mention that 20,000 of the total users were international roaming service users. Believable? 

Surprisingly, a spokesperson for China Mobile went on to reveal that they achieved 100 percent call connection rate and only around 0.27 percent of the calls were dropped.

The company also gifted 15,000 phones to Olympic officials.

As a result of the changes, China Unicom and China Netcom will merge and China Mobile will buy Unicom’s CDMA network, according to Reuters, while China Mobile will takeover China Railway Communication.

It’s an absolutely fascinating series of changes, all apparently aimed at balancing China Mobile’s dominance in the country’s mobile market. Rather puzzlingly, the Chinese government hasn’t put any timeframe on when the changes will happen – or provided that much detail on how all it will all work out. Watch this space.

Unsuprisingly, it’s web based services that will receive the bulk of the attention, including widgets that should be compatible with any handset or operating system.

The choice of partners looks to be interesting one – one operator from Japan, a country pretty much one of the most established and cutting edge in terms of mobile development and China, still a relatively new market but with lots of room from growth, and one all the established players have got their eye on. Hopefully there’ll be some intriguing applications coming out of this old mobile world-new mobile world collaboration – that is, if they can find something that appeal to users on low end handsets with slow connections equally well as speedy networks and high-end devices. After all, web browsing has proved far more popular for high end device – perhaps widgets will give operators a way to get in at the lower end.

Forbes says the operator will give away 20,000 TD-SCDMA mobile numbers free and will give way the same number of handsets for nothing, with other subscribers offered discounts of 100 to 200 yuan on their phones.

Things are certainly moving in the right direction for TD-SCDMA – and the Olympics looks like it’s figuring large in people’s minds: five out of the eight cities are Games venues.

Xinhua said China Mobile will block SMS coming from the seven advertising companies and will work with all the operators to sort out rules on SMS advertising.

200 million messages – how did they manage it? The paper says that there isn’t much punishment for companies sending out junk SMS. That said, you would have thought the cost of sending out 200 million texts would be prohibitive enough.

Xinhua also adds that China Unicom will also provide English, Korean and Japanese hotline services during the games and extend opening hours for its outlets around the Olympic venues. It looks like the most interesting race won’t be on the athletics track this Olympics: it’s all about the networks. China Mobile, which is also working on Olympics content has promised to get its 3G network up in time for the Games while Unicom is reportedly spending billions of yuan on improving its GSM network. I wonder which will go down better with visitors – slow and steady or fast and just-released?