The number of websites in China rose to 4.27 million at the end of 2015 as the country with the world's largest user-base expanded its tightly-controlled Internet coverage while keeping it effectively insulated from the outside world with firewalls, a report said on Friday.
A total of 620,000 Chinese websites were launched last year, exceeding the number of sites launched during the 2010-2014 period, according to a report released by the Internet Society of China.
Of the 4.27 million websites, 3.02 million were operated by companies, up 493,000 from a year earlier.
Around a million websites were run by individuals, representing an increase of 110,000 from 2014, state-run Xinhua news agency quoted the report as saying. China has the highest number of internet users in the world with 667 million people online.
Though it has made huge strides, China's Internet is comparatively among the slowest as it is restricted by firewalls to prevent users easily logging into banned foreign websites like Google, Gmail, Facebook and Twitter.
The Internet was extremely slow and restrictive during the just-concluded fortnight-long parliament session as Chinese firewalls targeted the Virtual Private Networks (VPN) widely used by foreigners to gain access. Popular US VPN Astrill has put out notices for its subscribers about the squeeze on its network apparently to ensure the Chinese public are not logged into read or see the coverage of the Parliament sessions by foreign media.
The Internet Society report said average mobile Internet traffic by Chinese netizens exceeded 366.5 megabytes per month in 2015, up 85.3 per cent year-on-year.
China built 922,000 4G base stations last year, bringing the total number to 1.77 million, data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology showed. The number of 4G users jumped to 386 million at the end of 2015, compared to 289 million at the end of 2014.