An outlet of China Telecom in downtown Nanjing, Jiangsu province. [Photo / China Daily]

BEIJING - Despite a government-led anti-monopoly move, only approximately 50,000 mobile subscribers have successfully changed their operators during the past six months and the government has said it's studying ways of increasing the number.

By the end of May, more than 40,000 subscribers in Tianjin municipality and 5,000 in Hainan province had switched to their preferred networks among China Mobile Ltd, China Unicom Ltd and China Telecom Corp Ltd, the three main operators, without having to change their mobile numbers.

During the six-month trial 500,000 applications to change were received, but only one-tenth managed to do so.

Gong Shuangjin, chief scientist at the China Academy of Telecommunication Research (CATR) at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), said there are still too many barriers for subscribers hoping to change their operators.

"Mobile numbers that are not registered with a real name are not allowed to change networks, while others allowed to do so are bound by the binding services provided by their operators," she said.

Wang Anping from MIIT, who is supervising the program, said that considering the 15 million total subscribers in the two cities, "50,000 is much lower than expected", adding that increasing this ratio will be the main task in the future.

Compared with the less than 0.5 percent of Chinese subscribers changing network, the global average is 2 to 3 percent, according to Chen Jinqiao, deputy chief engineer of the CATR.

Tian Ying, an analyst with Gartner Inc who specializes in the telecommunications industry, said the result is "within expectations".

"Although the three operators in China seem to be competitors, they are actually in an unspoken partnership," Tian said. "Thus no one wants to act over the top."

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The Chinese mainland has the largest number of mobile phone users in the world totaling 900 million, of which nearly 68 million are third-generation (3G) users. China Mobile currently has the largest number of subscribers while China Unicom has been gaining ground in the 3G area very quickly, especially boosted by its partnership with Apple.

In the United States, Neustar Inc, the third-party service provider, is responsible for the management of number portability (the ability to change operators while retaining the same number) and user database.

Chen said that his department is currently building up such an organization, and re-arranging the mobile number systems between operators.

"We hoped to have mobile number portability up and running by the end of this year, but with the disappointing result, it seems that we have to wait at least another year," he said.