The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the People's Republic of China issued a statistical bulletin on the 2022 communication industry on the 20th. According to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the investment and integrated application of the communication industry are driving the demand growth of the digital economy. According to the communique, in 2022, China's communications industry completed a total investment in fixed assets of 419.3 billion yuan (RMB, the same below), an increase of 3.3% from the high base of the previous year. The investment is further inclined to new infrastructure, of which the completed 5G investment is more than 180.3 billion yuan, accounting for 43%; Internet and data communication investment grew the fastest, up 26.2% over the previous year. China's network infrastructure continues to strengthen and consolidate the foundation for the development of the digital economy. China has built the world's largest optical fiber and mobile broadband network. The mobile network remains the world leader in 5G construction. By the end of 2022, China has built and opened 2.312 million 5G base stations, accounting for more than 60% of the total number of base stations in the world. As an important carrier for data information exchange, calculation and storage, the three basic telecommunications enterprises have continued to increase their investment in data centers. By the end of 2022, the number of data center racks serving the public has reached 818000, a net increase of 84000 compared with the end of last year. In 2022, with the support of new infrastructure such as gigabit optical fiber network and 5G, and driven by the popularity of high-traffic applications such as webcast and Internet of Things applications in some fields, mobile Internet traffic, fixed broadband access traffic, and Internet of Things terminal access traffic all show a rapid growth trend. Mobile Internet access traffic in the year reached 261.8 billion GB, an increase of 18.1% over the previous year. In 2022, the integration application will continue to expand. Intelligent manufacturing, intelligent medical care, intelligent education, digital government and other fields of integration and application have been emerging. The number of "5G+industrial Internet" projects invested and constructed across the country has exceeded 4000, and a number of 5G fully connected factories have been built. Telecom enterprises have provided more than 14000 5G virtual private networks using 5G slicing technology to help accelerate the digital transformation of various industries. (Xinhua News Agency)