Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) just released their newest survey result on the newest Internet Development in China. Total internet users in China exceeded 94 million by the end of 2004, about one half of the amount of internet users in the U.S. (180 million). Among them, the number of broadband users was 42.80 million. In the mean time, the number of computer hosts in China has raised to 41.60 million, an increase of 14.6% over the past 6 months. The numbers of domain names and websites registered under .CN were 432077 and 668900, increasing by 50000 and 43000 respectively, compared with the figures of 6 months ago. The bandwidth of international connection has reached 74429M; the total number of IPv4 addresses allocated to China has been 59945728, presenting a half-year growth of 38 percent and 21 percent respectively.

In additional to this, CNNIC also studied the diversity of the usage. The studies shows the information concerned by the netizens was no longer just focused on news. The figures from the report unveil the following results: as for the information that was mostly inquired, 29.3% users believed educational information was the mostly inquired information, 13.8% took automobile info and 24.2% considered recruitment info; as for the Internet services, the following Internet services or functions are still developing rapidly: Email, search engine, online banking, online trading, online advertisements, news, Internet games, among which, Email is still one of the most concerned Internet applications. The satisfactory degrees of the users for charged email and free email are 32.6% and 71.9% respectively.

The report tells that the primary reasons for non-Internet users not to access the Internet are that they do not know how to use computer/Internet (40.1%) and that there is no facility to access the Internet (23.1%). The level of the development of education and economy is still the main factor to limit the improvement of Internet. Thus, to facilitate the enhancement of the Internet in China, the promotion of the fundamental knowledge of Internet must be intensified and the local economy be greatly developed. (CNNIC "15th Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China")