Xiaolingtong, supposedly shut down, still has 15m customers

Xiaolingtong, the Chinese PAS/PHS mobile service, is still operating with 15 million customers six months after it was supposed to shut down.

In fact, users are cancelling their service at a declining rate, Sina reports.

In the year after the closure was announced in February 2009, an average of 1.82 million users left each month. For the first three quarters of last year it was 910,000, in the first five months of 2012 that shrank to 570,000.

Of course, set against China's 1 billion mobile and 284 million fixed line customers, the numbers are negligible, with no more than a few tens of thousands of users per city.

Some of the holdouts – known locally as ‘nailhouses’ - are no doubt hoping for compensation when inevitably China Telecom and China Unicom turn the network off.

Once it is closed down, Xiaolingtong’s 1880-1930Mhz spectrum will be reassigned to 3G.