BEIJING, Jan. 23 (Xinhua) -- China had 137 million
people online by the end of last year, up by almost a quarter from 2005, the
China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) said Tuesday.
The number of Internet users rose by 23.4 percent to
comprise 10.5 percent of the country's population, said the CNNIC in a report.
The statistics were based on telephone sample surveys
of 32,325 Chinese, and only those above the age of six and use the Internet for
at least one hour a week on average were counted as Internet users, said the
CNNIC.
Online services like e-mail, search engines,
e-commerce, blogs, online news and games saw rapid development, while new
technologies had brought new opportunities for the development of the Internet,
Minister of Information Industry Wang Xudong has said.
Broadband users exceeded 100 million for the first
time to reach 104 million, or 75.9 percent of all Internet users.
Another 17 million Chinese went online via mobile
phones, accounting for 12.4 percent of the Internet population.
High costs and low speed were the major factors that
prevented more Internet users from going mobile, said the report.
Most of the country's Internet users were male,
accounting for 58.3 percent of the total.
The report shows a yawning disparity between the
urban and rural areas, with Internet use in cities 6.5 times that in the
countryside.
A lack of knowledge of computers and the Internet as
well as inadequate access to equipment and networks remained the main
difficulties for those who failed to get online, according to the
report.
