Mobile phone users reach 500 million

China's mobile phone users reached over 500 million mobile in June, double the number in the US, and growing at a faster pace than the Ministry of Information Industry's (MII) forecast of 600 million mobile subscribers by 2010, Bloomberg reported. China Mobile and China Unicom added 40.6 million users in the first six months of this year for a combined total of 501.7 million, said Wang Lijian, a spokesman for MII. The country's mobile phone users grew at about eight times the pace of fixed-line customers last month as more people switched to wireless services. Demand also rose after the government allowed telecom operators to introduce billing systems in February that waived charges for incoming calls.