Survey Introduction - Methodology

Respondents were asked if they have used the internet, their background information: gender, age, level of education, profession, if they live in an urban or rural area, their income level, etc; netizen internet habits, intensity of internet usage^t1, internet experiences, etc.

 

The survey had 66,000 responses in total including 33,000 responses from fixed-line telephone users and 33,000 responses from mobile phone users. The responses cover continental China – 31 districts in total, which includes provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under government control.^t2

 

Computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI).

 

The survey was divided as follows：

Sub-group A：residents with fixed line phones (includes: residents with fixed line phones + Xiaolingtong (PHS) users^t3 + students with dormitory phones + other users of dormitory phones). “A” is used to represent surveys taken from Sub-group A.

 

Sub-group B：mobile phone users. “B” is used to represent surveys taken from Sub-group B.

 

Sub-group C：those people with both fixed line phones and mobile phones (this group is for those that are in both Sub-group A and Sub-group B). C=A∩B. “C” is used to represent surveys taken from Sub-group C.

 

CNNIC previously researched this group in 2005. The number of netizens in this group is very small, therefore this research survey used a hypothesis, namely: for the purposes of this research project, netizens that could not be reached via phone can be overlooked in the statistics.

 

The online survey was made mainly to help us understand typical internet application usage. CNNIC carried out the online survey from December 9 to December 31, 2008. The survey was placed on CNNIC’s website and links to this survey were placed on government media websites, the larger national ICP/ISP websites and each provincial information portal. Netizens took the initiative to fill in the survey. After receiving the completed surveys, technical methods were used to check the validity of the surveys and screen out the invalid surveys. The online survey received strong support from each big website and warm participation from many netizens. This online survey received 81,488 completed surveys. After removing invalid surveys, there were 72,152 completed surveys.

 

Automatic search is mainly performed to obtain technical statistics such as domain and website numbers as well as the corresponding regional distribution. Also, these statistical reports mainly include data on the number of IP addresses and international outlet bandwidths. 

 

 

The provincial IP address statistics came from the IP address databases of the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre (APNIC) and CNNIC. To obtain the number of IP addresses per province, data on which province registered and resolvable IPs belong to was combined from both of the two databases. Since address allocation is dynamic, all stats were used only as reference. Also, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology also requires that China’s IP allocating organizations (such as China Telecom) report the number of IPs they own twice a year. In order to ensure that the number is accurate, CNNIC will compare the reported numbers to the stats provided by APNIC. This allows for verification and confirmation of the final number of IP addresses.

 

 

The total number of Chinese domain names and total number of Chinese websites were summarized based on the two data sources below:

the first is the number of .cn domains and websites under .cn domains.  This information was obtained by CNNIC through automatic search; the second are Chinese-type global top-level domains (gTLDs) and websites under those domains, which were provided by various domain registration units within China. This data includes: all types of global top-level domains (gTLDs) and websites that have already been setup on those domains; domains and websites divided according to .com, .net and .org; domains and websites divided according to province of registration.

 

 

Websites were automatically searched starting at the homepage (www + domain name). Additional pages were searched layer by layer by following links to capture all the content and characteristics of webpages on each website. To obtain the total number of Chinese webpages and total byte count, the number of webpages and their byte counts found by web search were combined. This total does not include webpages with duplicate content.

 

 

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology regularly receives data on international outlet bandwidth from Chinese operators. The “Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China” draws on the data from these reports.