On April 18th, at the press conference on the industrial and information technology development in the first quarter of 2024 held by the State Council Information Office, Zhao Zhiguo, the spokesperson and chief engineer of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, stated that as of the end of March, the total number of 5G base stations built nationwide has reached 3.647 million, with a 5G user penetration rate exceeding 60%. The number of ports capable of providing gigabit network services has reached 24.56 million, and the world's first 400G all-optical inter-provincial backbone network link has been officially put into commercial use.
Key technologies have made rapid breakthroughs, completing the commercial verification of lightweight 5G coverage in high, medium, and low frequency bands. The performance indicators of quantum computing prototype machines continue to improve, and breakthroughs have been made in quantum error correction experiments. In the first quarter, the shipment volume of mobile phones, especially 5G mobile phones, in China reached 56.43 million units, accounting for 83.7% of the total shipment volume in the same period.
5G applications have been integrated into 74 out of the 97 major categories of the national economy, and have been scaled up in key areas such as industry, mining, electricity, and healthcare. There are over 10,000 "5G+ Industrial Internet" projects, and application empowerment is accelerating in core control areas.
Universal telecommunication services are steadily advancing, with the rural internet penetration rate reaching 66% by the end of last year, and the urban-rural gap continuing to narrow. In the first quarter, a total of 1 billion fraudulent calls and messages were intercepted.