China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, or MIIT, has released its first-quarter 2026 telecom industry update, showing that monthly data usage per mobile user climbed to a record 23.4GB in March.
According to the ministry, total mobile internet traffic reached 104.4 billion GB in the first quarter, up 19.1% year over year. By the end of March, the number of mobile internet users had risen to 1.623 billion, an increase of 13.48 million from the end of last year.
The most eye-catching figure in the release is the March DOU, or average monthly data usage per account. That number came in at 23.4GB per user, up 13.8% from a year earlier and 0.36GB higher than the level recorded at the end of 2025. In other words, China mobile internet usage kept moving higher even on top of an already huge user base.
Traditional voice and messaging metrics continued to slide. Mobile outgoing call duration totaled 468.3 billion minutes in the first quarter, down 5.6% year over year, while outgoing fixed-line call duration fell 21.2% to 13.26 billion minutes. Mobile SMS volume also declined 3.5%, and SMS revenue dropped 12.2%.
Even with those older services weakening, MIIT said the broader telecom sector remained stable overall. Telecom business revenue for the first quarter reached 439.4 billion yuan, down 1.8% year over year, while total telecom business volume, measured at constant prices from the previous year, increased 8.3%.
The report also showed steady expansion in fixed broadband. China’s three major telecom operators had 697 million fixed broadband subscribers at the end of March, up 5.841 million from year-end. Of those, 665 million were on plans offering access speeds of 100Mbps or above, accounting for 95.5% of all fixed broadband users.
Gigabit broadband adoption kept rising as well. Users on 1000Mbps or faster broadband connections reached 249 million, up 10.9 million from the end of 2025. That means gigabit users now account for 35.8% of all fixed broadband subscribers, 1.3 percentage points higher than at year-end.
Mobile subscriptions also continued to edge higher. MIIT said the combined mobile subscriber base of the three major carriers plus China Broadnet reached 1.836 billion by the end of March, an increase of 9.201 million from year-end. Among them, 5G users reached 1.254 billion after adding 49.53 million users in the first quarter, lifting the 5G share of all mobile users to 68.3%.
On the connected-device side, mobile IoT terminal users rose to 2.948 billion, up 59.54 million from the end of last year. Internet TV users across IPTV and OTT services also increased steadily to 410 million, with a net gain of 1.887 million.
Network construction stayed on an upward path too. China’s total optical cable line length reached 75.78 million kilometers, up 1.7% year over year. Access network fiber made up 60.5% of that total, local trunk fiber accounted for 38%, and long-haul fiber represented the remaining 1.5%.
Broadband access infrastructure continued to expand. MIIT said China had 1.26 billion broadband access ports by the end of March, up 13.28 million from year-end. Fiber-to-the-home and office ports reached 1.22 billion, representing 96.7% of all broadband access ports. The number of 10G PON ports capable of supporting gigabit network services rose to 32.01 million, up 387,000 from the end of 2025.
MIIT also said 5G buildout continued to deepen. China had 4.958 million 5G base stations in place by the end of March, a net increase of 120,000 from year-end. Those sites now account for 38.2% of all mobile base stations nationwide, up 0.6 percentage points from the end of last year.
