This guy’s got moxie. Shi Yu-chen loves the Chinese personal access system known as Little Smart (小灵通) so much that he’s sued China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology for cancelling the service without a public hearing and wants the Chinese courts to overturn MIIT’s decree, according to media reports. Good luck with that.

Some background: Little Smart is the hybrid fixed-line wireless service offered by China Telecom and the former China Netcom (now part of China Unicom). It was a way for the fixed line providers to get a slice of the wireless market and became quite popular because of its cheap pricing, despite the limits placed on roaming. At one point, users topped 90 million, but they have been steadily abandoning the service, lured by ever cheaper pricing and no roaming limits from GSM and CDMA plans.

So MIIT wants to snatch back the 1900-1920MHz frequency band used by Little Smart before the end of 2011. It may reallocate the band to 3G services. Current users of Little Smart will be forced to choose a wireless plan from one of the three Chinese operators.

Shi believes the market should decide the fate of Little Smart, not MIIT. At the very least, he seems to want a public hearing on the matter. I suspect this publicity stunt won’t get much further, as Little Smart’s fate has been decided. Even China Telecom and China Unicom aren’t investing in the networks because it makes little sense to keep them around as cheaper competitors to their own businesses. Little Smart gave PHS an extension on life, but its time has passed.