Mobile network connects our smartphones so we can ring each other. But in China, things are changing – Internet of Things (IoT) devices have overtaken cell phones to become the mainstream user of mobile network.

That means, there are more machines than people that are using the cell towers in the world's most populous country – this is also the first major economy to witness this change.

"The mobile IoT network is changing from serving people-to-people communication to people-to-things and things-to-things ones," The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said in an infographic explaining its mobile IoT achievements.

According to MIIT, China's mobile IoT landscape is comprehensive, ranging from energy-saving narrowband IoT to superfast 4G and 5G.

"China has the world's largest mobile IoT network, with more than 755,000 narrowband base stations, 5.9 million 4G stations and 2.1 million 5G ones," said MIIT.

The narrowband IoT has been applied to water meters, gas meters, smoke detectors and electric vehicles, each has more than tens of millions of devices.

The 4G version is widely used in fields like wearables, vehicle charge stations, push-to-talk systems and wholesale.

More than 20,000 IoT systems are using the most recent 5G technology.

Back in 2018, there are two cellphones for each of the 670 million IoT devices in China. But now the number of IoT devices is approaching 1.7 billion, 20 million more than cellphones.

This milestone could resemble the year 2011, in which the smartphone shipment surpassed the PC shipment for the first time in history. Since then, the mobile internet boom significantly changed how the Chinese access information.