section_path: Infrastructure/Telecommunications
section_name: Telecommunications
paragraph_text: Telecommunications
  
  China is the largest telecom market in the world and currently has the largest number of active cellphones of any country, with over 1.7 billion subscribers, as of February 2023. It has the largest number of internet and broadband users, with over 1.1 billion Internet users as of December 2024 —equivalent to around 78.6% of its population. By 2018, China had more than 1 billion 4G users, accounting for 40% of world's total. China is making rapid advances in 5G —by late 2018, China had started large-scale and commercial 5G trials. As of December 2023, China had over 810 million 5G users and 3.38 million base stations installed.
  
  China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, are the three large providers of mobile and internet in China. China Telecom alone served more than 145 million broadband subscribers and 300 million mobile users; China Unicom had about 300 million subscribers; and China Mobile, the largest of them all, had 925 million users, as of 2018. Combined, the three operators had over 3.4 million 4G base-stations in China. Several Chinese telecommunications companies, most notably Huawei and ZTE, have been accused of spying for the Chinese military.
  
  China has developed its own satellite navigation system, dubbed BeiDou, which began offering commercial navigation services across Asia in 2012 as well as global services by the end of 2018. Beidou followed GPS and GLONASS as the third completed global navigation satellite.