So what's the key difference in the operating environments of mobile carriers in China (and much of the rest of the world), where choice of handset seems to be fairly decoupled from access to the network?
For Europe, I think it was having lots of relatively small countries. That led to lots of national phone companies which had a monopoly in their country. To facilitate international calls, they had to cooperate. When wireless networks started, none of them could build a network covering significant parts of Europe. Again, they (eventually; there were some early networks that were incompatible with each other) had to cooperate.
Next/somewhat in parallel, the EU forced national phone companies to be privatized and allow competition.
The net result is GSM, where companies share their networks, and subscriptions are tied to SIM cards.
For China, I guess they just made the right choice, looking at the USA and Europe as options.
1. Chinese carriers are all government-run, basically. There's basically two: China Unicom and China Mobile. Almost everyone used to use the latter, but Unicom is getting better recently (last few years). It takes a lot of effort to follow though, so I'm not 100% on all that (I'm back to China for Chinese new year in a couple of weeks, living in Thailand now!)
2. Nearly everyone uses prepay.
3. Most people aren't living in debt.
4. There is a massive market for cheap and/or stolen phones.
5. A not insignificant number of phones, particularly at the luxury end, are 're-routed' from the Hong Kong 'export' market back in to the mainland.
6. Chinese save a lot of money and don't tend to live beyond their means as much as Americans.
7. The entire mobile infrastructure is generally less than ten years old.
8. The Chinese produce their own infrastructure hardware (chiefly Huawei).
9. The Chinese government wisely sees infrastructure as a political and security tool, and so probably subsidises it in many ways. (This also goes for roads, electricity, etc.)
10. Coverage is far better than the US. You almost never have no coverage, even waaaay out in the hills. And in 10 or so years, I've never had a dropped call.
Prepay doesn't seem like something that would drive a market difference in the US. The carrier prepay options are much more limited here.
Similarly, I wonder how the the age or creator of the mobile infrastructure (7 & 8) figures into offering of mobile devices independent of network access by carriers - maybe in the homogeneity of the mobile network?
