China builds world’s largest fiber optic network and mobile broadband

China has constructed the world’s largest mobile broadband and fiber optic network with network quality reaching the world’s top level, a senior Chinese official said on Tuesday, World Telecommunication and Information Society Day.

“Fixed broadband has been upgraded from 100 megabits per second to 1,000 megabits per second, and the proportion of optical fiber users has increased from less than 10 percent in 2012 to 94.3 percent in 2021,” Zhang Yunming, vice minister of industry and information technology, said.

In addition, China has built nearly 1.6 million 5G base stations across the country, accounting for over 60 percent of the global total, making China the first in the world to set a large-scale 5G network based on an independent networking mode, Zhang added.

China had set up a total of nearly 1.43 million 5G base stations as of the end of 2021, accounting for over 60 percent of the global total, with 10.1 5G base stations serving every 10,000 people in China, nearly double the number at the end of 2020, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Amid the country’s efforts to boost information and communication technologies, in 2021, China’s investment in 5G reached 184.9 billion yuan (about $29 billion), a share of 45.6 percent in fixed-asset investment of the telecommunication industry, up 8.9 percentage points from that of 2020.

The ministry added China would make steady and orderly progress toward the establishment of 5G services and gigabit fiber-optic networks in 2022 with its 5G users expected to exceed 560 million by 2023, and every 10,000 people in the country would then be served by more than 18 5G base stations.

The Chinese government has supported the construction of fiber-optic networks in 130,000 villages and 4G base stations in 60,000 villages, raising the rural broadband coverage from less than 70 percent to 100 percent, Zhang said, noting that the country has applied 5G in the fields of transportation, medical care, education, culture and tourism.

Moreover, 5G has also become the key technology in China’s industrial Internet and is widely used in 45 major sectors of the national economy covering research and development, design, production, manufacturing, marketing and services.