Beijing to connect more villagers

The Chinese government is aiming to connect 95% of villages to telecom services by the end of the year, Xi Guohua, vice-minister of the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) promised at a ceremony to mark the 37th annual World Telecom Day. Xi said Beijing would accelerate the construction of telecom infrastructure in rural areas to close the digital divide. In the first quarter of the year, 25.4% of newly-registered telephone users were from rural areas, up 1.5 percentage points from a year ago. More than 50,000 villages in China remain unconnected.