China's mobile subscriber base at 1 bn

The number of Chinese mobile phone users reached record high of 1.01 billion last month, registering a 20.67 per cent increase, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) announced.

The MIIT said in a statement that the number of 3G mobile phone users rose by 15.5 million in the first two months of 2012 to reach 143.92 million.

During the same period, the number of fixed-line telephone users dropped by 828,000 to 284.29 million, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The number of Internet users with broadband access totalled 154.96 million by end of February, with a net increase of 4.96 million during the first two months, it said.

Besides being the largest mobile and internet market, China is also the home to about 300 million mircrobloggers, again the highest in the world.

In the last one year, microbloggers, mostly communicating through the mobiles emerged as an alternated media challenging the monopoly of the state-run media.