Cut-price 'Little Smart' wireless a big hit in China

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With at least 20 million subscribers in China, the unusual technology has overcome the initial failure of its launch in its native Japan late in the 1990s, where its level of mobility was over-hyped and the cost advantage was not sufficient to win success.

It is also set to take off in India and Indonesia, the other major developing markets in Asia.

And it offers a growth alternative -- alongside Nextel Communications Inc.'s walkie-talkie push-to-talk system -- to the dominant Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technologies.

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China had 234.5 million mobile users by the end of June, making it the world's largest mobile market by users, and future subscribers will come from smaller cities or the countryside where some two-thirds of the population live, analysts said.

That's a market that Little Smart, or "Xiaolingtong" in Chinese, can court regardless of 3G because its chief advantage is price, they said. Per minute rates are 50 to 75 percent lower than other mobile services.

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Has anyone heard of this technology? It sounds like a great way for the developing world to get wireless communications to the masses at a much more affordable price, without paying royalties to the U.S. CDMA (particularly) and GSM consortia. Should also help democratic impulses in China and elsewhere.