China’s telecom industry improved further in quality in 2021: 5G and gigabit optical networks accelerated in coverage and adoption, mobile internet traffic kept growing fast, and overall industry prices fell even as revenue grew.
Revenue growing, prices falling
Telecom revenue totalled RMB 1.47 trillion in 2021, up 8.0% year on year – the highest growth since 2014, 4.1 percentage points faster than 2020. Emerging enterprise-facing services such as cloud computing, big data and data centres grew 27.8%, contributing 44.5% of revenue growth to become the top driver; fixed and mobile data and internet services remained the stabiliser at 61.5% of revenue.
Telecom business volume grew 27.8% to RMB 1.7 trillion at constant prices, while the industry’s composite price index fell 13.6% – helping cut costs for production and daily life and supporting the digital economy.
5G and gigabit networks
By end-2021, 1.425 million 5G base stations had been built and activated – the world’s largest 5G network, covering all prefecture-level city districts, over 98% of county seats and 80% of townships, and extending to rural areas with demand. China holds over 60% of the world’s 5G base stations, at 10.1 per 10,000 people, nearly double a year earlier. 5G investment reached RMB 184.9 billion, 45.6% of telecom fixed-asset investment.
More than 300 cities have started gigabit fibre broadband builds, and broadband access investment rose 40% for the year. At end-2021, 7.86 million 10G PON ports had been installed, giving the network the capacity to cover 300 million households. Carriers deepened cloud-network integration and built converged cloud-edge computing networks, doubling their data-centre customer base in 2021.
Users and traffic
Mobile users reached 1.643 billion – 116.3 per 100 people, above the global average of 104.3 – with 1.069 billion on 4G and 355 million on 5G, together 86.7% of all mobile users. Fixed broadband users on 100 Mbps or faster plans reached 498 million, 93% of the total, up 3.1 points in a year; total access bandwidth reached 139.41 million Gbps and average signed bandwidth per household hit 266 Mbps.
Information technology keeps empowering traditional industries: there were over 10,000 innovative 5G industry application cases across 20-plus economic sectors, moving from production support into core processes, with 5G-plus-industrial-internet scenarios now being replicated at scale. Cellular IoT connections reached 1.399 billion, closing in on mobile phone numbers – the gap narrowed from 458 million in 2020 to 244 million. Smart public utilities, smart manufacturing and smart transport deployed 314 million, 254 million and 218 million IoT terminals respectively.
Mobile internet traffic reached 221.6 billion GB, up 33.9%; monthly usage per user hit 13.36 GB, and December’s 14.72 GB set a record. Short video and livestreaming drove consumption: on top of a five-year average growth rate of 109% from 2016 to 2020, traffic still grew 33.9%, and 2021 traffic was 23.6 times the 2016 level.
Universal service and shared builds
Every administrative village in China now has broadband. Rural broadband users reached 158 million, up 15.81 million in a year, with rural download speeds above 100 Mbps – the same network and the same speed as cities.
Shared construction and operation delivered 840,000 5G base stations, 58.9% of the total. The industry also ran elder-friendly service upgrades, targeted fee cuts, and special rectification of the internet sector and apps, while telecom big data supported routine pandemic control and served the broader economy.
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