As a former British colony and territory, technical standards in Hong Kong of today has been largely influenced by that of the United Kingdom, with some exceptions due to local and practical considerations.

Electrical plugs and adaptors

Before the legislation of the Electrical Products Regulation (a few years prior to the handover in 1997), British standard

extension cable An extension cord (US), power extender, drop cord, or extension lead (UK) is a length of flexible electrical power cable (flex) with a AC power plugs and sockets, plug on one end and one or more sockets on the other end (usually of the same type ...

s, plugs and

adaptor An adapter or adaptor is a device that converts attributes of one electrical device or system to those of an otherwise incompatible device or system. Some modify power or signal attributes, while others merely adapt the physical form of one con ...

s were seldom found in the market. Electrical appliances were fitted with 2-pin plugs and quasi-UK three pin plugs (which meant they were compatible with

BS 1363 Plugs and sockets for electrical appliances not hardwired to mains electricity originated in the United Kingdom in the 1870s and were initially two-pin designs. These were usually sold as a mating pair, but gradually de facto and then officia ...

BS 546 Plugs and sockets for electrical appliances not hardwired to mains electricity originated in the United Kingdom in the 1870s and were initially two-pin designs. These were usually sold as a mating pair, but gradually de facto and then officia ...

sockets, but the plug itself did not comply with the

British Standard British Standards (BS) are the standards produced by the BSI Group which is incorporated under a royal charter and which is formally designated as the national standards body (NSB) for the UK. The BSI Group produces British Standards under the ...

). After the enforcement of the regulation, many British standard electrical products are common in Hong Kong market. Some adaptors common in the United Kingdom are not available in Hong Kong. Conversely, local manufacturers develop adaptors for the Hong Kong market and they are not often sold in the UK. Some local manufacturers print the

Union Flag The Union Jack, or Union Flag, is the ''de facto'' national flag of the United Kingdom. Although no law has been passed making the Union Flag the official national flag of the United Kingdom, it has effectively become such through precedent. ...

on the plugs and extension cables, but these products are not manufactured or sold in the United Kingdom. This practice has not ceased even though Hong Kong was transferred to the

People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, sli ...

in 1997.

Electric sockets (wiring system)

Based on the adapted version of IEE Wiring Regulations, the colonial Hong Kong Government published ''Code of Practice for the Electricity (Wiring) Regulation'' in the 1990s. This book has been revised several times and the latest version was published in 2009. In Government buildings, public housing estates and Government-sponsored educational institutions, British electrical products (brands include Tenby,

MK electric MK Electric is a company that makes electrical accessories. The company's headquarters are in Basildon, Essex, England, from where it sells goods worldwide. History In 1912 Charles Arnold and Charles Belling formed Belling and Company maki ...

, Federal Electric, MEM, Crabtree, Legrand etc.) are often used. However, these British electrical products are not very popular in the private sector. Some people consider that British sockets are not very good-looking so they prefer other brands. Australia-based

Clipsal Clipsal is an Australian brand of electrical accessories. Their primary factory, once located at Bowden, moved to Gepps Cross, South Australia. Smaller factories in South Australia at Nuriootpa, Strathalbyn, Wingfield, Bayswater and in Victor ...

(produced by

Gold Peak Gold Peak Industries (Holdings) Limited is a Hong Kong-based battery manufacturer established in 1964. They have been listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 1984. The Group has built few brand names for its major product categories, suc ...

in China) is the most popular brand in private buildings, and some Government buildings built after the

handover In cellular telecommunications, handover, or handoff, is the process of transferring an ongoing call or data session from one channel connected to the core network to another channel. In satellite communications it is the process of transfe ...

of Hong Kong to

PRC China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

in 1997.

Telephone sockets

Before the

of Hong Kong, all the domestic telephone sockets installed were

BS 6312 BS, B.S., Bs or bs may refer to: Arts and entertainment *BS-, a prefix for all games broadcast for the Satellaview modem via the Japanese Broadcasting Satellite system * "B.S." (song), a song by Jhené Aiko from the album ''Chilombo'' *Team BS, ...

British telephone sockets British telephone sockets were introduced in their current plug and socket form on 19 November 1981 by British Telecom to allow subscribers to connect their own telephones. The connectors are specified in British Standard BS 6312. Electrical chara ...

but there was no stipulation on commercial telephone sockets. Both

Registered Jack A registered jack (RJ) is a standardized telecommunication network interface for connecting voice and data equipment to a service provided by a local exchange carrier or long distance carrier. Registration interfaces were first defined in the ...

(RJ) and BS 6312 systems were (and are) found in commercial telephone installations. After the handover, the

Hong Kong Government The Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, commonly known as the Hong Kong Government or HKSAR Government, refers to the executive authorities of Hong Kong SAR. It was formed on 1 July 1997 in accordance with the Sino- ...

started gradually replacing the BS 6312 sockets with American RJ ones.The RJ System of telephone plugs and sockets is gradually replacing the BT System in Hong Kong

Office of the Telecommunications Authority The Office of the Communications Authority (OFCA) is an executive arm of the Communications Authority in Hong Kong. It is the body responsible for telecommunications regulation (through the Regulatory Affairs Branch), antitrust enforcement (thr ...

(OFTA), Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Government Service providers install RJ sockets, instead of BS 6312 ones, for clients in new installation, relocation or maintenance projects. Existing BS 6312 sockets before the handover are still in use and there is no compulsory replacement programme.

Computers

Keyboard layouts

In the Crown colony, United States and Chinese (Traditional) keyboards were utilized by both the colonial Hong Kong Government and the public. United Kingdom layout keyboards are rare in computer malls in

Sham Shui Po Sham Shui Po is an area of Kowloon, Hong Kong, situated in the northwestern part of the Kowloon Peninsula, north of Tai Kok Tsui, east of Cheung Sha Wan and south of Shek Kip Mei (). It is located in and is the namesake of the Sham Shui ...

and

Mong Kok Mong Kok (also spelled Mongkok, often abbreviated as MK) is an area in Kowloon, Hong Kong. The Prince Edward subarea occupies the northern part of Mong Kok. Mong Kok is one of the major shopping areas in Hong Kong. The area is characterise ...

. However, Japanese keyboards can occasionally be found.

Regional settings in Microsoft products

The default regional setting of Microsoft Windows sold in Hong Kong is "English (United States)". Many users in Hong Kong complain that their spell checker software highlights locally correct spelling like "colour" since they did not change the default regional settings in their

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

s and software applications. Most users, however, just leave the default regional setting (English (United States)) unchanged. Chinese versions of Microsoft Windows are far more popular than the English-language version among Chinese-speaking computer users in Hong Kong. Moreover, since many people use Chinese versions of Microsoft Windows and

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a ma ...

to produce their webpages and emails, many English-language websites and emails In Hong Kong have the encoding "Chinese (Traditional)" (

Big5 Big-5 or Big5 is a Chinese character encoding method used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau for traditional Chinese characters. The People's Republic of China (PRC), which uses simplified Chinese characters, uses the GB 18030 character s ...

) rather than "Western European" (

ISO-8859-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in ...

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

webpages are also not very common. Setting the browser to the encoding of "Western European" to view these Big5 Hong Kong webpages may cause some characters (for example, ',", £, € etc.) to be displayed incorrectly.

TV broadcast

Analogue terrestrial

Hong Kong used the UK PAL-I broadcast system. Stereo audio is under

NICAM Near Instantaneous Companded Audio Multiplex (NICAM) is an early form of lossy compression for digital audio. It was originally developed in the early 1970s for point-to-point links within broadcasting networks.Croll, M.G., Osborne, D.W. and Sp ...

system, which is the same as British standard.

Digital terrestrial

Hong Kong has adopted the system developed by PR China in 2006.

DVD and VCD

In the UK

DVD The DVD (common abbreviation for Digital Video Disc or Digital Versatile Disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any kin ...

s are region 2, of

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a colour encoding system for analogue television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

standard. However, even though Hong Kong is under control of the People's Republic of China, DVDs found here are not Region 6 (for users in the

Mainland China "Mainland China" is a geopolitical term defined as the territory governed by the People's Republic of China (including islands like Hainan or Chongming), excluding dependent territories of the PRC, and other territories within Greater Chin ...

). Officially, the DVDs in Hong Kong are region 3 in NTSC colour-coding. DVDs of region 1 (US, NTSC format) or region 2 (Europe, PAL format) can be also found in local shops like

HMV Sunrise Records and Entertainment, trading as HMV (for His Master's Voice), is a British music and entertainment retailer, currently operating exclusively in the United Kingdom. The first HMV-branded store was opened by the Gramophone Company ...

, which is not an issue for the local market as DVD players commonly sold in the shops are multi-region. Just as other Asian countries,

VCD Video CD (abbreviated as VCD, and also known as Compact Disc Digital Video) is a home video format and the first format for distributing films on standard optical discs. The format was widely adopted in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the ...

s are common for rental and sale in Hong Kong but these discs are not popular in the UK.

Telecommunications

Hong Kong uses the GSM 900 & 1800 standards and some operators offer 3G services (3G 2100).

Analog video

Similar with the US, Japan and Australia,

S-Video S-Video (also known as separate video, Y/C, and erroneously Super-Video ) is an analog video signal format that carries standard-definition video, typically at 525 lines or 625 lines. It encodes video luma and chrominance on two separate chan ...

is commonly used in colonial and post-handover Hong Kong equipment. These ports are commonly found there on consumer TVs, DVD players, VCRs and game consoles sold there. Although the UK uses the higher-quality

RGB The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three additiv ...

signal transmission scheme provided by European Standard

SCART SCART (also known as or , especially in France, 21-pin EuroSCART in marketing by Sharp in Asia, Euroconector in Spain, EuroAV or EXT, or EIA Multiport in the United States, as an EIA interface) is a French-originated standard and associated 2 ...

, SCART ports are seldom found in Hong Kong equipment. For RF signals, the Belling-Lee connector or IEC 169-2 connector are very commonly used in equipment sold in Hong Kong. However, same as Europe, the 75-ohm

F connector The F connector (also F-type connector) is a coaxial RF connector commonly used for "over the air" terrestrial television, cable television and universally for satellite television and cable modems, usually with RG-6/U cable or with RG-59/U ...

is used by

Cable TV Hong Kong Hong Kong Cable Television Limited (), formerly known as Wharf Cable Television Limited () until 31 October 1998, is a cable television provider in Hong Kong currently owned by Forever Top (Asia) Limited, which operates it as a part of i-Cable ...

instead of Belling-Lee ones.

References

External links

GSM Roaming - Hong Kong
{{DEFAULTSORT:Technical Standards In Hong Kong Science and technology in Hong Kong British Hong Kong Electrical wiring

Hong Kong Hong Kong ( (US) or (UK); , ), officially the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (abbr. Hong Kong SAR or HKSAR), is a city and special administrative region of China on the eastern Pearl River Delta i ...