If you've ever wondered why dropped calls are so much rarer in China than in the U.S

China Mobile â ' the largest carrier in the world â ' serves 550 million users with 550,000 base stations, which cover 99% of China's population, according to Bill Huang, general manger of China Mobile Research Institute. In comparison, the largest U.S. carrier AT&T serves roughly 100 million users and has 200,000 base stations, covering 85% of the U.S. population, he said, suggesting that the Chinese carrier's broader coverage is what makes its signal strength reliable.

If Huang seemed satisfied with his company's performance in the present, however, he was concerned about the future. Giving an overview of the trends and challenges ahead for the sector, he warned that companies like China Mobile need to think about their businesses more broadly or risk becoming irrelevant. 'We are not in the communications business. We are in the information services business,' he said. 'If we do not make that leap of faith â ¦ we will wake up one day to see that people are not using our networks anymore.'

Huang highlighted Japan's Softbank as a case study for what's to come for the rest of the industry, saying that Softbank was the first carrier in the world to see data usage surpass traditional voice usage, adding that carriers will have to find a way to increase profits as data usage increases.

He didn't talk much about state-owned China Mobile's own third-generation mobile network, which operates a locally-developed standard called TD-SCDMA that hasn't been commercially successful outside of China.

Instead, the executive talked about China Mobile's deployment at the Shanghai Expo of a fourth-generation network that allowed news crews to broadcast live video from their cameras without satellites and vans full of equipment. With the rollout of fourth-generation networks around the world, he said, end-users will no longer have to worry about whether they can get mobile service when they're traveling abroad because carriers around the world are collaborating to determine future mobile technology standards.

Today, with many of the world's carriers using different technology standards for third-generation networks, cellphones that can be used with, say, China Mobile's TD-SCDMA network, cannot be used in the Japan, where a different standard is used.

Separately, Huang discussed smartphone platforms in his speech, touting China Mobile's move to embrace open platforms by launching its own OPhone operating system, based on Google's Android.