I agree with you that service stinks in China but I find the bolded part hilarious.

+1. Class action lawsuit....against Unicom?

If Unicom is actually overselling to the point where you can't even make calls, it seems pretty easy to argue that they aren't fulfilling their end of the contract (of course, if their customers are prepaid or are free to leave without paying any sort of penalty then I can't see any lawsuit having any leg to stand on).

Absolute worst case scenario for Unicom: someone calls an emergency number because someone's life is in danger, and the call drops while they are talking to the dispatcher, and someone possibly dies due to the delay. Really bad publicity to say the least.

I was in Japan during the big earthquake in 2011, in the center of Tokyo. The quake was felt strongly there (although there was little damage to most buildings, there were some fires throughout the city). NTT DoCoMo not only kept the voice network up, but the data service continued uninterrupted and was usable (albeit slow) throughout the afternoon and into the evening. Now this was before smartphones really took off. Would their data service continue working if a similar earthquake occurred today? I'm not sure, but I know that if Unicom is having trouble when there isn't even an emergency, I'd hate to see what would happen if an earthquake hit Beijing.

It appears that you are not tuned into the inner workings of China's legal system STS, hence the

So I can start a company in China, make promises to my customers, take money from them, not follow through on the services I promised them, and suffer no legal repercussions? I'm not a huge fan of shady business ethics but that is rather tempting.

Or is there money being passed around under the table by large companies like Unicom to pay off judges to ensure that all rulings go in their favor? Although I can't imagine that some judges would be very sympathetic to Unicom, especially if they use the service and had 3 dropped calls in 10 minutes on the way to the courthouse that morning.

I haven't had this problem with AT&T international roaming in China (which essentially bypasses the firewall since it tunnels back to AT&T's APN) but then again I haven't been to China in 2 years.

My guess is that their Huawei WCDMA network is oversold. Now it certainly isn't a equipment problem since the same Huawei equipment is used in Canada and Europe without any problems (they innovated with IP RAN). I guess they really need to increase cell site density. I believe Unicom's network in the major cities in China is already the latest 21Mbps which also increases spectral efficiency.

The judges are the government. Unicom is the government. You're a foreigner. Good Luck.

Yeah, I'm not sure if the people on here who live in China have noticed how much worse it's gotten, but it's definitely gotten a lot worse than the last time I was there (1.5-2 years ago). Just like you don't notice your own kids getting taller, they probably don't notice how many connectivity dropouts they've gotten. I'm like the uncle from out of town who comes in and sees the kids and notices that they've grown a lot since the last time I saw them.

I don't even have a case. I got a prepaid SIM and Unicom didn't hold me to any contract and not let me out without paying a penalty. Obviously I'd suggest that a local person, who bought an iPhone on a contract and couldn't leave without paying a penalty would sue Unicom over the penalty payment, if Unicom refused to waive it. This was essentially the crux of the issue with the Cingular lawsuit: it wasn't the crappy service that Cingular was penalized for, it was charging customers for breaking their contracts to escape their crappy service. Very limited in scope, actually. And Cingular was merely ordered to refund the early termination fees to customers, but not the service fees. If customers chose to stick around and not cancel, they received no refunds whatsoever.