Neglect mobile knowledge: China’s telecoms giants are promoting AI token plans

For years, cellular carriers have billed customers by the gigabyte. Now, China’s telecoms giants are looking for to monetise the artificial intelligence growth by introducing a brand new unit of measurement to month-to-month payments: the AI token.

On Sunday, China Telecom unveiled nationwide, token-based pricing packages geared toward a variety of consumers – from informal customers to builders and companies – in keeping with info listed on the corporate’s app.

Shopper packages, tailor-made for on a regular basis duties, begin at 9.9 yuan (US$1.45) per 30 days for 10 million tokens and improve in worth and quantity to 49.9 yuan for 80 million tokens. Enterprise packages, which assist coding and AI agent deployment, vary from 39.9 yuan to 299.9 yuan per 30 days, with token allowances from 15 million to 250 million.

AI tokens are the essential models of textual content, code or knowledge that an AI mannequin processes or generates. Simply as streaming a video consumes megabytes, asking an AI chatbot to jot down an essay, debug code or generate a picture consumes tokens.

One token is the same as about 4 characters, or roughly three-quarters of a phrase, whereas 1 million tokens is the same as the size of the complete Harry Potter guide sequence. In languages like Chinese language, a single character will be break up into two or three tokens. Processing a high-resolution picture may cost a little an AI mannequin anyplace from 200 to over 1,000 tokens.

China Telecom is bundling its token plans with its proprietary AI mannequin, TeleChat, alongside widespread third-party techniques like Zhipu AI’s GLM-5 and DeepSeek-V3.2, with non-compulsory add-ons for enhanced community connectivity and cybersecurity.

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