Large fall in new mobile use figures
30/11/2008 10:24
Only 3.22 million new mobile phone subscribers dialed in during October,
far less than this year's average monthly increase of 8.5 million.
The
drop, however, has more to do with collecting new user figures than the impacts
of the global financial crisis, according to a Ministry of Industry and
Information Technology (MIIT) report.
The main reason for the fall was
that the operator of the country's CDMA mobile phone network had been changed
from China United Telecommunications Corporation (China Unicom) to China
Telecommunications Corporation (China Telecom), according to the
report.
With the change of the operating body, the method of collecting
the number of users with mobile phones configured for code division multiple
access (CDMA) had changed.
As a result, the number of the CDMA
subscribers by the end of October was 4.99 million fewer than that at the end of
September, it said. China Telecom brought CDMA assets from China Unicom in
September.
The MIIT report said the telecom sector's total revenue
reached 679.79 billion yuan (US$99.5 billion) in the 10 months to October, up
8.1 percent from a year earlier. Total investment in the telecom sector reached
185.05 billion yuan in the first 10 months, up 9.9 percent year on
year.
By the end of last month, China had more than 627.26 million
handset users, the MIIT report said.
"The telecom industry continued to
maintain sound development but growth was gradually slowing down," said the
report.
Xinhua
|
