A sales assistant makes a phone call in a mobile phone store in Lin'an, Zhejiang province,?Nov 22, 2013. [Photo/icpress.cn]

BEIJING - The number of Chinese mobile phone users hit 1.22 billion at the end of October, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) said on Thursday.

Among them, 67.19 percent or 817 million mobile phone users are connected to the Internet and 34.5 percent of them are 3G users.

In contrast, fixed lines are decreasing. The number of fixed line users shrank by 8.82 million in the first ten months to 269 million at the end of October.

The mobile phone users account for 81.9 percent of phone users and ?fixed line users 18.1 percent.

Guangdong, Henan and Sichuan provinces reported the most mobile phone user growth in the first ten months.

The number of Chinese mobile phone users hit 1.11 billion at the end of 2012.