CNNIC, China’s Ministry of Information Industry’s (MII) internet statistics bureau, released their semiannual (20th) report in July of this year. I only recently stumbled across it.

All their English reports can be found here.

The reports are widely referenced (including by me) and I thought it would be a good opportunity to take a closer look at their methodology and their findings.

Methodology
Internet users were surveyed by land line telephone and mobile phone, with data collated by province. 7500 people were contacted via land line and 5000 via mobile phone. About 21,000 online surveys were filled out on CNNIC’s web site.

IP address information came from APNIC and CNNIC (managing IP address allocation in Asia and China, respectively). Domain information came from national and provincial name registrars.

Bandwidth data came from MII.

Gathering basic technical data such as IP addresses, bandwidth, and domain names is simple, CNNIC has easy access to all of that. It’s the survey data that is problematic. 12,500 phone interviews and 21,000 online surveys seems a rather small sample for a country of 1.3 billion. The report goes into great detail on how people were identified and their “classification”. It struck me as humbug.

Growth in internet users
Based on those survey responses, CNNIC reported an increase of 25 million to 162 million internet users, 12.3% of China’s total population. In the footnote for that number, CNNIC cites Internet World Stats, June 2007, for the figure of 162 million. In turn, Internet World Stats cites CNNIC for the same month.

The 19th report, from January 2007, had no footnote source for its number of internet users (137 million).

It makes me wonder if someone is just making all these numbers up. Or doing a survey and only kinda making them up.

I don’t think it really matters, if anything their numbers are conservative. My completely irrational, baseless guess would be that there are a lot more internet users in China.

Maybe CNNIC is right. They say that internet penetration has reached a tipping point and is set to increase rapidly over the next three to five years. I hope they keep Internet World Stats in the loop.

Accessing the internet via mobile phone
44 million users now access the internet via mobile phone. In the 19th report the number given was 17 million. The 18th reported 13 million. This is based on their survey data. I can’t even understand how they came up with 162 million users, much less how they jumped from 17 to 44 million internet via mobile phone users.

It’s disappointing because this is probably the most interesting part of the report.

Another number, although I’m getting more and more skeptical these days, is the recent milestone of 600 million mobile phone users. It was reached this past summer. An unknown percentage of them use smartphones that are able to access the internet as a client as a computer would. I’ve tried before to sort out a reasonable number for smartphone users in China, with little success. If the service charges become more affordable, it’s a sure bet that mobile internet access will be widely adopted. Perhaps even surpassing conventional PC access.

Internet user demographics
Some highlights from the survey results:

70% of users are 30 years old or younger
52.9% are between the ages of 18 and 30
34.5% of 18 to 30 year-olds use the internet, the highest of any age group
40% (about 71 million) of internet users have university degrees
93.4% of university graduates are internet users
The largest group by occupation is students
76.9% of internet users are urban residents
21% of all urban residents use the internet
5.1% of all rural residents use the internet

There’s also gender information, salary averages, etc., etc. I quickly lost interest in the user data, it has little real value.

However, I’m sure there are some sales and marketing people who would give their left leg for the list of survey participants. They seem to be quite the model demographic.

When thesauruses fail
Where the CNNIC’s data can be taken seriously are the numbers for IP addresses and domain names in China. The report states that China has 118 million IP addresses and 9.2 million domain names.

The 19th report had 98 million IP addresses, and the trend is getting increasingly steep. It’s important to remember that these IP addresses are public addresses. Two or three individual IP addresses may be the public addresses for a 100 PC office or internet cafe. Smartphones use private IP addresses and connect to the internet via public addresses from their provider.

118 million IP addresses is only the starting point.

Domain names have jumped from 4.1 million in January to 9.2 million in July. This includes .CN as well as global domains such as .COM, .NET, etc (.CN had the largest increase). “Jumped” may not be the best choice of words. I just can’t think of a grammatically correct way to use “escape velocity” as a verb. While the number is somewhere up in the troposphere, there’s no explanation of what they consider a domain name. Is “mail.mydomain.com.cn” counted as distinct from “mydomain.com.cn”? Later in the report they mention that there are 1.3 million web sites in China. Assuming each of those represents a single domain, there are still a lot of domain names left to account for.

While there may be a little sloppiness in the report’s explanations, it’s obvious that the internet in China is undergoing nothing less than stunning growth.

International connectivity
China’s internet connections to the outside world are increasing, but no where near the overall growth of the internet in China. Seven providers serve 312Gbps of internet connections. Based on personal experience, accessing international sites from China is noticeably slower than it could be. However, performance is adequate.

I have heard of problems with the internal architecture of the Chinese backbone, but nothing substantive. CNNIC provides a map, as of December 2006, of internet connectivity in China here.

Geographic distribution
As one would expect, geographic distribution of IP addresses, domain names, and web sites is roughly approximate to the region’s economic development.

Some interesting notes:

Shanghai increased its share of IP addresses from 6.1 to 7%
Shanghai is now the overall leader in domain name registration, with .CN increasing almost ten-fold from 152,000 to 1.4 million. Similar increases were shown for most developed regions in China
The number of websites in Guangdong hardly changed, while Beijing (now #1) and Shanghai (#2) roughly doubled and quadrupled respectively

While it’s difficult to draw any conclusions from this data, it certainly looks as if the focal point of the internet in China is shifting towards Shanghai.

The takeaway
The report is credible, if not authoritative, on technical data. But I found the survey-based data on users unverifiable, therefore incomprehensible, and ultimately illegitimate.

Like anything else written about China these days, the report raises more questions than it answers.

That’s why China is so damn interesting.

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