China officially tops one billion mobile subscribers

We heard last year that China was approaching 900 million mobile phone subscribers, and it looks like it's now finally hit the big one. The country's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology confirmed today that, as of the end of February, there were more than a billion mobile subscribers in the country (1.01 billion, to be specific). As the AFP notes, that's individual subscriptions, which includes users with more than one phone, but any way you slice it that's a whole lot of cellphone users. Of those, 144 million are on 3G networks, which is fully double the number from April of 2011. Not surprisingly, much of that growth comes at the expense of landline phones, which have dropped a further 828,000 in the first two months of the year to 284.3 million. Internet use also continues to be on the upswing, with more than half a billion people having internet access of some sort, and 154.96 million having broadband access (up nearly five million during those same two months).

China officially tops one billion mobile subscribers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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