China added nearly a million 4G base stations last year

China telcos sector might be facing the same headwinds as everyone else, but they're stikll posting some bumper growth numbers.

According to MIIT year-end stats, FTTH now accounts for three quarters of all internet ports, up from 59% a year ago. Operators added another 181m during the year to take the total to 522m. DSL ports declined by nearly two-thirds to just 37.3m, 5% of the total.

Altogether China now has 690m available fixed-line internet access connections, up 19.8% from 2015.

Led by China Mobile, the operators also kept up their brutal 4G rollout. They installed 926,000 base stations in 2016, of which 861,000 were LTE. Between them they're now operating 5.59m sites, of which 41.7% are 4G.

On the subscriber side, the cellcos added an amazing 340m 4G customers - the total is now 770m. But that’s still just 58% of the 1.33 billion user base. Some 184m 2G accounts are still active, along with around 170m 3G accounts.

Other stats, charted here by website C114:

• Sixteen of the 31 cities and provinces have passed 100% mobile penetration. Beijing leads with 178% followed by Guangdong on 132%. At the low end are Anhui and Jiangxi at around 70%.

• The three operators added 37.74m broadband customers. Current total is 297m (this varies from operator filings, which tallied 260m customers at Dec 31).
• Mobile data traffic totalled 9.36 terabytes, up 123%.