China's telecommunications industry reported steady growth in the first two months of this year, official data showed.

The combined revenue of the industry reached 224.2 billion yuan (about 31.55 billion U.S. dollars) during the period, up 1.5 percent year-on-year, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

In breakdown, revenue from fixed-line communications of the three telecom giants -- China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom -- totaled 75.3 billion yuan in the period, rising 8.7 percent from one year earlier.

Their revenue from mobile communications reached 148.9 billion yuan, contributing 66.4 percent of the sector's total revenue, said the MIIT.

Mobile internet traffic surged 44.2 percent year-on-year to 23.5 billion gigabytes in the period, with the traffic via cellphone soaring 39.7 percent year-on-year to 22.6 billion gigabytes, accounting for 96.4 percent of the total.

Some 1.26 billion cellphone subscribers surfed the internet via their phones, accounting for 79.9 percent of all cellphone users.

The industry actively promoted the growth of value-added services including internet data center, big data, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. The three major telecom operators earned 28.1 billion yuan in value-added services in the period, up 16.7 percent year-on-year.

Short messages also registered a 37.1-percent rise year on year in the first two months, up 19.8 percentage points over the same period last year.

(Cover: VCG)