China's telephone penetration rate exceeds 83%

According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, China had only 250,000 telephones in 1949, and there were 70 million in the world. By the end of 2009, the number of fixed-line telephone and mobile phone users in China totaled more than 1 billion.
At the end of August, the total number of telephones in China reached 1.13 billion and the penetration rate has exceeded 83%, said Yang Xueshan, vice minister of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
Yang said China had 420 million internet users by the end of June for a penetration rate of 31.8%, making China the largest internet user in the world. Its broadband penetration rate is close to 10%.
China Knowledge estimates that such growth has added between 0.8% and 1.3 % to China’s GDP.