China breaks 40 million 4G users, and that number is growing fast

The last time we checked in on China’s still-nascent 4G network, which was this past July, it was still pretty small. While the country’s 3G market was booming with nearly half a billion subscribers, 4G numbers were languishing just under 14 million.

What a difference a few months make! Yesterday, China’s Ministry of Industry and Informatization Technology (MIIT) released a report saying that the country now has more than 43 million 4G subscribers. Although July’s numbers came from a different source – China’s State Council Information Office – MIIT’s report suggests that over the last few months, the country has gained nearly 30 million new 4G subscribers.

Given that 4G was first launched in China all the way back in December of 2013, this increased growth speed is good news. Subscriber numbers grew slowly between 4G’s launch in the winter and this past summer, thanks in part to the fact that the government issued a 4G operating license only for China Mobile’s TD-LTE network, and not for the competing FDD-LTE networks of China Mobile and China Unicom. Its intent was to bolster the domestically developed TD-LTE standard as the standard for 4G at home and abroad.

See: Indonesia’s only 4G service breaks hearts with stealthy price hike

The MIIT report also contains some other interesting tidbits for those interested in China’s telecom industry. The country now has 1.27 billion mobile users and more than 200 million broadband users, of which 35 percent pay for speeds of 8 Mbps or higher. More than 90 million new smartphones shipped in China during the third quarter of 2014, and China’s smartphone users are using an average of 186 MB of data services every month. (That might seem small, but it’s nearly 50 percent more data than they were using last year during the same period).

The full report is available in Chinese on Techweb.

(Source: Techweb)