Telecommunication in Hong Kong

Development of telephone and internet connections

With an average download speed of 198.53 Mbit/second for fixed-network broadband internet, Hong Kong ranks 8th in an international comparison. The upload rate was only 139.39 Mbit/second (5th place).
In mobile internet, i.e., on tablets and smartphones, Hong Kong comes 37th with a download speed of 54.17 Mbit/second. The upload speed of around 12 Mbit was only enough for 51st place.

The Speedtest Global Index published regularly by Ookla is based on several million individual measurements in February 2023 from 180 countries.

This is how much a mobile phone contract costs in Hong Kong

Every year, the International Telecommunication Union calculates for many countries what a mobile phone contract costs to use. A monthly budget averaging US$ 11.80 was calculated Hong Kong in 2021. Compared to the previous year, this amount increased by 1 cents.

The ITU refers to the costs for monthly use and includes 140 telephony minutes, 70 text messages and a data transfer of 2 GBytes. The transfer speed should be the minimum of a 3G connection, i.e. at least UMTS, which is already outdated in many parts of the world. 2 GBytes do not sound much. However, this is already quite a high consumption in a worldwide comparison. If one does not take a fixed amount in US dollars, but converts it to the economic output per inhabitant, a user in Hong Kong spends 0.26% of his gross national income on mobile telephony. Worldwide, this rate is around 6.6 percent.

In the USA, the monthly cost was around $41.80.

The following diagrams show the development of the various telephone and internet connections as a percentage of the country's population. Values above 100 percent mean that, on average, every inhabitant has more than one connection.

Access to the internet in Hong Kong from 1990 - 2021

Broadband internet in Hong Kong 1998 - 2021

The expansion of broadband internet in Hong Kong is roughly on a par with the USA. Around 93 percent of all residents have access to the internet. Around 40 percent have their own fast internet connection, which is at least faster than the former ISDN (more than 256 kbit/s). All fixed connections via DSL, cable or satellite were counted here, but not those connected to the internet via mobile communications.

The two largest telecommunications providers based in Hong Kong are China Mobile in Hong Kong and China Unicom in Victoria. China Mobile had a market capitalization of US$ 147.05 billion in 2022, , with total revenues of US$ 131.49 billion. The number of employees was 449,934. The value of China Unicom was US$ 15.06 billion, with revenues of US$ 50.83 billion. China Unicom had 242,497 employees.

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