CNNIC Says Chinese Internet Users Break 420 Million Mark

The China Internet Network Information Center has published its 26th report on the development of the Chinese Internet.

According to the report, the number of netizens in China is increasing. By June 2010, there were 420 million netizens in China, including 115.08 million in the rural areas, accounting for 27.4% of the total. Mature netizens take a larger percentage in the age structure of the Chinese Internet users than before, and those above the age of 30 account for 41% of the total.

At the same time, the educational background and income level of the Chinese netizens has lowered. The time period spent in the use of the Internet by Chinese netizens continues to increase and reached an average of 19.8 hours per week per user.

However, insufficient bandwidth is still a problem for the Chinese Internet sector. At present, the penetration of broadband in China has reached 98.1% and the number of people using broadband is 363.81 million. The bandwidth is still insufficient. Statistics from Akamai, a U.S. distributed computing platform for global Internet content and application delivery, shows that the average Internet speed in China is 857kbps, which is much slower than that in the U.S., Japan, and South Korea.

CNNIC also reported that by June 2010, the number of China’s IPv4 addresses had reached 250 million, an increase of 7.7% compared with six months ago. IPv4 address resources are nearly exhausted and a transition to the IPv6 addresses is imperative.