The Ministry of Information Industry (MII) said on January 22, 2007 that 98.7 percent of the tens of thousands of administrative villages in mainland China are connected to the national telephone network, which will be expanded to the less-developed natural villages in the remote or isolated areas in the near future.

MII minister Wang Xudong said on Monday that all the administrative villages across the country will be covered by the national telephone network service by the end of 2007, as part of the efforts to wrap up the "Telephones-Reaching-All-Villages Project" initiated by the MII in 2004. The minister added that equipment maintenance and service management in the villages will be improved while charges will be lowered to more acceptable levels. "We will guarantee all the villagers satisfactory telephone service at low costs," he said.

By pooling the financial and technical resources of all telecoms operators in China, the giant project has invited them to expand their markets and businesses into the vast countryside for rural telecommunications and IT application. Earlier reports said China has invested 200 billion yuan ($25.6 billion) in extending telephone services to the country's nearly 700,000 administrative villages over the past two years, and has built 6,389 agricultural websites by November 2006 to provide information services on agriculture machine, trade and labor services, which are well received by farmers.

The Ministry of Information Industry has planned to provide telephone service to all administrative villages and Internet service to all townships in three years. According to the project blueprint of the MII, "all villages will have telephones, and all townships can get online" in the country by the end of 2010. However, this is a goal not so easy to achieve, said an industry expert. The recent statistics released by the Ministry of Information Industry on its Website show that 22 of the nation's 31 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities had all their administrative villages connected into the national telecommunications grid.

More than 60 percent of China's current 1.3 billion-plus population live in the country's rural areas by the end of 2005. China now has 830 million fixed and mobile telephone subscribers, and 132 million Internet users.

Mainland China has over 680,000 administrative villages and several thousand natural villages. These villages scattered in all corners of the country will come into easy touch under the spreading telecoms network and the World Wide Web.

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