Over the first seven months of 2015, China's mobile Internet traffic consumption reached 2.02 billion gigabytes, which represented a year-on-year increase of 95.3%.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology published these statistics, and further stated that traffic consumption in July 2015 set a new record with 347 million gigabytes.
According to the statistics, the monthly average mobile Internet traffic consumption of Chinese users was 330.9 megabytes, a year-on-year increase of 85.1%. Meanwhile, semi-annual performance reports of Chinese telecom operators revealed that during the first half of 2015, Chinese mobile users' data traffic consumption saw a year-on-year increase of 154%, which was much higher than the global average growth.
China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom accumulated 1.295 billion users in total. Of that number, the total number of 3G and 4G users was 695 million, accounting for 53.7% of total mobile users; while the number of 4G users was 250 million, accounting for less than 20%. Since 4G users will be the major traffic consumers for a period of time in the future, the telecom operators are accelerating the transfer of 2G and 3G users to the 4G network. MIIT statistics revealed that 3G users decreased by 4.37 million in July 2015; while 4G users increased by 25.05 million.
In contrast with the large increase of mobile data traffic, mobile call volume saw a year-on-year decrease for seven consecutive months. Mobile short message service also continued to decline due to the replacement impact from Internet applications.