The average Chinese citizen consumed over seven GB of data in March

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Mobile devices in China are increasingly popular as everything from shopping to paying bills to buying food is done online. A total of 25.6 billion gigabytes (GB) of mobile data were used in the first quarter in China, according to the new statistics released by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) on Thursday, which sees year-on-year growth of 129.1 percent.

Nearly 1.3 billion Chinese connected to the internet with their mobile phones by the end of March, showing a 133.2-percent increase from the first quarter of last year. Those mobile phone users used 25.5 billion GB of mobile Internet data, accounting for 99.5 percent of the total.

March alone saw the average mobile data for one user reaching an average of 7.27 GB, with year-on-year growth of 121.1 percent.

This is an inevitable trend as China has endeavored to speed up the Internet and lower costs in recent years; a hot topic in government work reports of the past three years.

The country aims to cut another 20 percent of mobile data fees by the end of this year.

Meanwhile, China has taken efforts to build up its communication capabilities by accelerating the construction of optical fiber broadband network as well as mobile communication base stations.

According to the statistics, the number of broadband Internet access ports reached 889 million nationwide by the end of March, up 10.1 percent year-on-year, and 3.04 million more than at the end of the previous year. The optical fiber ports accounted for nearly 90 percent.

A total of 1.13 million kilometers of optical fiber cable were built nationwide during the first three months, and the total length went to 44.71 million kilometers, achieving year-on-year growth of 14.6 percent.

The total number of mobile communication base stations reached 6.62 million, including 4.85 million 3G/4G base stations.

Eastern China had the most households – 142.19 million – that have access to fixed broadband of 100Mbps or above by the end of March, said the statistics, with the central region having 75.2 million, western having 74.79 million and the northeast having 19.86 million, but those gaps continue to narrow.

(Cover via VCG)