China on Sunday 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 state media reported.
The old telephones, operated by rotating a disk with numbered holes, had been used at Menzhong village in Nedong County of Tibet since 1974, Xinhua news agency reported from Lhasa, the regional capital.
China Telecom, the country's leading telecom carrier, has invested US $17 million to set telephone networks to realise that all the 683 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.
During the January-June period, 68 million Chinese households added telephones, with 33 million taking fixed lines and 35.33 million subscribing to cell phones.
Fixed telephone users and cell phone users in China now total to 295 million and 305 million respectively, the Ministry of Information Industry has said.