China registered 3.22 million new mobile phone subscribers in October, far less than the average monthly increase of 8.5 million recorded in the first nine months to September, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said Saturday.

By the end of last month, China had more than 627.26 million handset users, the MIIT said in an industry report posted on its website.

It said the deceleration last month may have nothing to do with the impact of the global financial crisis. The main reason was that the operator of the country's CDMA mobile phone network had been changed from China United Telecommunications Corporation (China Unicom) to China Telecommunications Corporation (China Telecom), according to the report.

With the change of the operating body, the method of collecting the figure of users with mobile phones configured for code division multiple access (CDMA) had changed. As a result, the number of the CDMA subscribers by the end of October was 4.99 million fewer than that by the end of September, it said.

China Telecom brought the CDMA assets from China Unicom in September. Since Oct. 1, around 20,000 China Unicom employees had been transferred to China Telecom, and the main operation body had become China Telecom since then.

The MIIT report said the telecom sector's total revenue reached 679.79 billion yuan (99.5 billion U.S. dollars) in the 10 months to October, up 8.1 percent from a year earlier. Total investment in the telecom sector reached 185.05 billion yuan in the first 10 months, up 9.9 percent year on year.

"In October, the country's telecom industry continued to maintain sound development. But the growth pace was gradually slowing down," said the report.

MIIT figures also showed the total number of telephone users, including both mobile phone users and fixed-line users, reached more than 978.7 million by the end of October while the mobile phone users accounted for over 64 percent of the total.

The total number of fixed-line users continued to drop last month, by 1.71 million, to stand at 351.44 million by the end of October. In the first 10 months, about 14.2 million users unsubscribe from fixed-line telephone service, the MIIT said.

(Xinhua News Agency November 29, 2008)