China has said goodbye to 'dial telephones' when the last such unit was replaced with a state-of-the-art wireless unit in a remote Tibetan village.

The old telephones, operated by rotating a disk with numbered holes, had been used at Menzhong village since 1974.

China Telecom, the country's leading telecom carrier, has invested US$17 million to set telephone networks to realise that all the nearly 700 counties and towns in Tibet are able to communicate with outside by wireless telephone. Around 17,800 families have joined the network since its launch in 2003.

Fixed telephone users and cell phone users in China now total to 295 million and 305 million respectively.

(CRI July 26, 2004)