MIIT Relaxes Geographical Restrictions on Some VATS in FTZs

On May 29, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) issued a Notice entitled Relaxing Geographical Restrictions on Service Facilities for Some Telecommunication Value-Added Services in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone (Document 164), expanding some of the service facility openings from the free trade zones to all of Shanghai, and even nationwide in one case.

In a previous announcement issued on April 15, MIIT had indicated that service facilities must be located within the Shanghai FTZ. But according to the May 29 Notice, service facility installation requirements have been fully or partially relaxed for three categories of Telecommunication Value-Added Services:

Expanded from FTZ to Shanghai Municipality

• Installation for Call Center business
• Edge routers installation for domestic Internet VPN business

Expanded from FTZ to nationwide

• Website accelerator server nodes (limited to one's own company website and not permitted for content distribution business)