Ministry of Industry and Information Technology: Broadband through villages and villages has been fully realized, and the burden of rural broadband networks has been greatly reduced

China News Finance, December 30 (Reporter Wu Tao) "As of the end of November 2021, China's existing administrative villages have fully realized 'broadband access from village to village', and problems such as communication difficulties in poor areas have been historically solved." Xie Cun, director of the Department of Information and Communication Development of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, introduced it at a press conference on the 30th.

On the 30th, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology held a press conference on "Broadband through Villages and Villages". Image source: Ministry of Industry and Information Technology

Xie Cun said that at the beginning of the "13th Five-Year Plan", there were still 50,000 administrative villages in China that did not have broadband, including a large number of poor villages with established archives, and 150,000 administrative villages with broadband access capacity of less than 4Mbps, and there was a clear "digital gap" between urban and rural areas.

Since October 2015, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has deployed seven batches of telecom universal service construction tasks, from supporting optical fiber access to 4G network construction, and from supporting administrative villages to frontiers and islands. It has supported the construction of optical fiber networks in 130,000 administrative villages and 60,000 rural 4G base stations nationwide.

According to reports, one-third of the tasks are deployed in poor areas, promoting the proportion of broadband in administrative villages, poor villages, and "three districts and three states" deep poverty areas from less than 70%, 62%, and 26% to 100% respectively, the average download rate of rural optical fiber exceeds 100Mbps, and the level of communication infrastructure in rural and remote areas has been significantly improved.

Xie Cun said that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is also focusing on reducing the threshold for access to the Internet, carrying out accurate fee reductions, and ensuring "affordable" networks. On the basis of speeding up and reducing fees for the majority of users across the country, it is required that the general service tariff of telecommunications should not be higher than that of other regions. Promote basic telecommunications enterprises to continue to give 50% discount or less to rural poverty alleviation households basic communication service tariff discounts, and the precise fee reduction measures have benefited more than 28 million rural poverty alleviation households, with a cumulative profit of more than 8.8 billion yuan.

"In the vast rural areas, only 30 or 40 yuan per month, users can enjoy personal mobile phones, fixed broadband and network TV packages, rural users use broadband network burden significantly reduced, the sense of gain effectively improved." Rural Internet penetration reached 59.2%, doubling from the early days of the 13th Five-Year Plan, and the gap between urban and rural penetration rates narrowed by 15 percentage points. Xie Cun said.

Xie Cun also said that 100% broadband access to primary and secondary schools (including teaching points) across the country, telemedicine covers all poverty-alleviated counties, and high-quality basic education medical resources are accelerating to expand to rural areas. The wide coverage of the urban and rural network has effectively guaranteed that 200 million students will "stop classes and do not stop learning" during the epidemic period, effectively support scientific and accurate prevention and control of the epidemic, help rural governance and grass-roots party building, and promote great changes in the appearance of rural production and life.

"The national rural online retail sales increased from 353 billion yuan in 2015 to 1.79 trillion yuan in 2020. Network traffic has brought product sales to rural people, increased the number of income, and improved the quality of life. Xie Cun said. (End)