
Telecommunication in China
Compared to the European Union, China has a slight downturn in the development of telecommunications. Under the country code +86, there were a total of 1.90 billion connections in 2020. Among them were 1.72 billion mobile phones, which corresponds to an average of 1.2 per person. In the EU, this figure is 1.2 mobile phones per person.With about 20.60 million webhosts, China is below the world's average by population. At the end of 2020, 1.34 million million of these, or about 6 percent, were secured with SSL or comparable encryption.
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Development of telephone and internet connections
With an average download speed of 162.74 Mbit/second for fixed-network broadband internet, China ranked 6th in an international comparison. The upload rate of only 37.72 Mbit/second was significantly lower (43rd place). The quality of the Internet, consisting of signal fluctuations (jitter) and latency, is very far ahead at 5th place.In mobile internet, i.e. on tablets and smartphones, China comes 13th with a download speed of 80.53 Mbit/second. The upload speed of around 23 Mbit was enough for 4th place.
The Speedtest Global Index published regularly by Ookla is based on several million individual measurements in April 2022 from 181 countries.
The following diagrams show the development of the various telephone and Internet connections as a percentage of the country's population. Values above 100% mean that, on average, every inhabitant has more than one connection.
Access to the Internet in China from 1990 - 2020
Broadband internet in China 2000 - 2020

Landlines 1990 - 2020
Mobile phones 1990 - 2020
Distribution in 2020 | China Total | China percent | EU Total | EU percent |
---|---|---|---|---|
Internet users | 993.36 m | 70.40 % | 379.21 m | 84.74 % |
Broadband users | 483.55 m | 34.27 % | 163.72 m | 36.59 % |
Landlines | 181.91 m | 12.89 % | 160.15 m | 35.79 % |
Mobile cellulars | 1.72 bn | 121.79 % | 540.56 m | 120.80 % |