Originally Posted by
garykung
Again - no.
The main reason for the discontinuation of the dual number SIM is the name authentication issue. This is why it is a feature that has been discontinued for prepaid cards, but not for postpaid services.
Yeah, although I would be willing to give them my passport to enable the mainland number.
Leave it to China to put useless laws on the books though. If one is going to place a bomb somewhere and detonate it by calling or sending an SMS to a SIM, one can just as easily do it with a foreign SIM that's doing int'l roaming. Or with an old fashioned timer.
To be specific, the Mainland number on those cards does not work when there's a two-step SMS verification approach in which you reply to an SMS sent to your Mainland number. Some sites, like 12306, use this approach. Your reply SMS doesn't show your number in the right format.
I don't understand. The only contents of a SMS message (its payload) are what you type on your phone which is up to 160 characters. Unless it's a long message in which case it's up to 918 characters broken into 153-character chunks. Are you saying that there's some metadata in there that won't be correct?
BTW, I've never encountered one of those types of portals before. I've only seen ones where you enter a number sent to you via SMS (most common) or authenticate via WeChat (less common). But yeah this is another thing I find very annoying. If people are going to have free WiFi for customers, they should just run an open AP like almost all Starbucks stores do (connect to "Google Starbucks" or "attwifi"). Maybe you have to connect to a captive portal and agree to some terms and conditions but there's not something that asks you to receive a text and enter its contents into a box. Only place I've ever NOT been able to use the WiFi at a Starbucks was one in Beijing, which had one of those damn portals that asked me for a +86 number!
