About 84.5 million Chinese were using their mobile phone to log onto the Internet, which accounted for nearly 30 percent of the country's total netizens, an industry expert said in Beijing on Tuesday.

Yang Zemin, director of the Telecom Research Institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, said China registered 68.7 million new cell phone users in the first eight months, which brought country's mobile phone user population to about 616 million.

He estimated the number of Internet users had reached 275 million by the end of September and 85 percent were broadband users.

The number of fixed-line users began to make a negative growth. Through August, the number of fixed-line users stood at 354 million, down 11 million from the 2007 figure, Yang said.

He added the total telecom industry revenue reached 540 billion yuan (US$79.1 billion) through August, up 8.5 percent from a year earlier.

(Xinhua News Agency October 15, 2008)