Paying phone / broadband bill by card (BJ)

[roddy]

This is a relatively new thing, so here's a how-to.

固定电话充值卡 - cards for paying fixed telephone charges - are now available for those of you who aren't set up to pay it online and don't fancy waiting in the bank. They aren't available everywhere - a couple of newspaper kiosks I asked at didn't have them, but the little shops that specialise in phone cards should have them.

They come in denominations of 100Y and 50Y. Using them is pretty simple, but there's no English on the card, and the English menu seemed to miss out the main use, which is to pay your phone bill (and broadband bill, more importantly) - you can also use them to recharge Xiaolingtong mobiles and a couple of other things.

Handy thing is you can put your account into credit - so if you wanted you could just pay 6 months worth at once, and not have to worry about it again.

If you are having trouble with the Chinese menus (or fancy practising your listening ) you need to . . .

Dial 2018 - 1 for Chinese - 1 to pay the phone bill (this bit confused me, as they read out the options from 3 downwards, and I thought I'd forgotten how to count - hit # to confirm you want to pay the bill for that phone, or enter the number of the phone you want to pay for and hit # - 1 to pay - and then enter the password under the scratch-off panel of the card.

If you have a bank account set up that will allow you to pay online, that's easier still, but if not this is much nicer than going to the bank. As far as I know this only applies to Beijing, but I guess other cities may have similar set-ups.

Roddy

[roddy]

I guess other cities may have similar set-ups.

Dalian does, but you need to dial 116117 and then if I remember correctly its 1 > 1> 1 > # > 1 > card number > #

[liuzhou]

We've had these in rural Liuzhou for a while now. You have just reminded me to dig out the instructions which I scribbled on a piece of paper somewhere. It certainly wasn't very user friendly, I remember that.

[roddy]

I'd imagine most places have this now. The Dalian one doesn't have the English option like Beijing and the woman speaks a hell of a lot faster too. Took me a while to figure out what I was meant to do, as the name of the card is 一卡充, but I didn't know that and kept missing the 一卡充服务 option.