(ATF) On Friday morning (March 19), the State Council Information Office held a press conference to remind citizens that parts of the government’s work was proceeding well – the number of Internet users in China had increased to 989 million, and just over 70% of people had access to the Net.
Yang Xiaowei, deputy director of the National Internet Information Office, said that during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, China led the world in the scale of information infrastructure.
China has built the world’s largest optical fibre network and 4G network. The number of Internet users has increased from 688 million at the end of 2015 to 989 million at the end of the 13th Five-Year Plan at the end of last year.
The report also showed that 5G commercialisation is speeding up in an all-round way. The number of 5G base stations that have been built has reached nearly 720,000, and the number of 5G terminal connections exceeds 200 million. China’s large-scale deployment of IPV6 is also going on.
Gigabit optical fibre covers link to more than 100 million households, and all cities have built optical networks.
In regard to the penetration rate of optical fibre users, which reportedly ranks first in the world, the main reason for the speedy and continuous rollout is incentives for the three major operators to claim fee-reduction for performance. This was an objective of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), which regulates China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom.
The Ministry has issued a “Gigabit City Construction Index System”, which will deploy gigabit broadband in more than 300 cities and carry out gigabit broadband application demonstrations. Gigabit broadband is currently being laid out in Beijing.
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