By Yin Lei
China's telecommunications sector has generated RMB 672 billion in revenue at the mid-year mark, the latest statistics of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology showed.
This revenue represented a 4.1 percent year-on-year growth versus the rate of 4.2 percent from January to May.
Fixed telecommunications services maintained a two-digit revenue expansion. The three domestic giants, the China Mobile Communications Corporation, the China United Network Communications Group Co., Ltd. and the China Telecommunications Corporation, received a total of RMB 195.8 billion from such services in six months, up by ten percent year-on-year. Their mobile telecommunications businesses yielded RMB 476.2 billion, up by 1.8 percent year-on-year.
The Internet mobile data and services still grew but at a slower pace, creating RMB 309.5 billion for the above three giants, up by 12.8 percent year-on-year.
The number of 4G subscribers crossed the 1.1 billion mark, boosted by the lifting of mobile data caps by the above three operators in June. Mobile broadband users, or 3G and 4G mobile subscribers, accounted for 83.2 percent of all the 1.51 billion mobile subscribers in China as of the end of June.
Over 80 percent of the fixed broadband internet connections, or 300 million of them, have a speed of 50 Mbps or above. The Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) subscriptions amounted to 142 million, with over 20 million added from January to June.
Total call duration continued its fall in the first half of 2018, down by 4.6 percent year-on-year to 1.28 trillion minutes. Short message service (SMS) saw a sustained revenue growth, up by 5.7 percent to RMB 19.5 billion, driven by the robust demand generated by log-in confirmations and identity authentication.
The average data of usage (DOU) per subscriber in June touched 4.24 GB, up by 172.8 percent.
Fiber to the home (FTTH) had covered 86.3 percent of all the 832 million fixed broadband internet connection points in China by the end of June.
