Recently, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) released data revealing that as of August, the combined user base of the four major operators in China—China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Broadcasting Network—had surged to 1.849 billion, with 1.311 billion being 5G subscribers, representing 70.9% of the total.

Over the first eight months of the year, the cumulative mobile internet data traffic reached a staggering 297.1 billion GB. In August alone, the average monthly data usage per person soared to 23.45 GB, marking a 12.4% year-on-year increase.

Furthermore, the number of broadband access users served by these operators has also climbed to 1.27 billion.

Upon reviewing these figures, have you noticed a particular trend?

In my view, there's a clear pattern: operators have effectively been reduced to mere conduits for apps like WeChat and Douyin.

What exactly does 'conduit' imply in this context? In the telecommunications sector, a conduit denotes a transmission network where operators are solely responsible for 'transmitting data from point A to point B' without involving themselves in the management of upper-layer content and applications.

In simpler terms, they merely provide internet data traffic.

Take WeChat as an illustration. Prior to its ascent, operators reaped substantial profits from SMS and voice call services.

However, with the advent of WeChat, SMS, once a cornerstone and highly profitable business for operators, has been relegated to a 'verification code-only channel' and is now virtually insignificant.

Following WeChat's rise to prominence, many individuals have also abandoned traditional phone calls in favor of WeChat voice chats. Consequently, the once-lucrative voice call business for operators has been on a steady decline.

Today, the mobile internet landscape is dominated by various content platforms such as Douyin, Hongguo, iQIYI, Youku, and Tencent Video, all of which have risen to prominence. It's fair to say that operators have been reduced to mere sellers of data traffic, with users primarily accessing the internet through the data traffic provided by these operators. Isn't this the essence of being a conduit?

If alternative vendors could offer data traffic for mobile phones, computers, and other devices to connect to the internet, I believe consumer-end (C-end) users would promptly abandon operators, as they would serve no other meaningful purpose.

In fact, at the dawn of WeChat's emergence, operators' greatest apprehension was being reduced to mere conduits. Hence, they undertook numerous initiatives to avert this fate.

Nevertheless, the trend is irreversible. In the personal market, operators lack entry points, ecosystems, and user mindshare. They are destined to function as conduits. After all these years, operators now appear to have embraced their role and are striving to excel in it. If they fail to do so, they will indeed become obsolete.