 which has service throughout Europe. These two organizations offer their customers the option purchasing roaming services throughout Europe and Asia. Asian Market Bridge Alliance has grown to include mobile operators in 11 Asian countries. Many of Bridge Alliance's partners are operators in which SingTel is a part owner. This includes SingTel's subsidiary Optus in Australia, which supplies Sing with two-thirds of its annual revenue. The alliance sells prepaid mobile phone cards that can be used in any of the 11 countries for unlimited cellular voice or data transmissions for periods of one to three days per prepaid card. Other large mobile providers in Asia include the following: China Mobile China Unicom Vodafone, headquartered in the United Kingdom Telenor, headquartered in Norway Hutchison Whampoa, headquartered in Hong Kong Etisalat, headquartered in the United Arab Emirate VimpleCom, headquartered in Russia Malaysia has one of the highest per-capita incomes in Asia and has a robust middle class. Its government is a constitutional monarchy. It also has many mobile competi- tors. Most residential customers currently access the Internet over High-Speed Data Packet Access (HSDPA), an advanced 3G (3.5-generation) mobile protocol. In addi- tion, the Malaysian government has initiated a Broadband Plan to assist in the imple- mentation of new broadband Internet technology. Interestingly, voice mail is not widely available in most Asian countries. This con- trasts with North America and Europe, where voice mail was used extensively before the widespread availability of text messaging. In most of Asia, consumers skipped directly to text messaging. In countries such as China, India, and Thailand, people rely on text messaging to leave messages when there is no response to a phone call. Text messaging is also used for distant communications if long-distance mobile fees are prohibitively expensive. China China is the fourth largest country worldwide in terms of geographic area, following only Russia, Canada, and the Uni