About 530 million cross-Strait phone calls were made during the first three quarters of this year, an increase of about 15 percent from the same period last year, Taiwan authority statistics show.

It said the total time on the phone between the two sides reached 1.79 billion minutes in the first three quarters, an increase of more than 10 percent.

However, correspondence between the two sides fell by about 26 percent during the same period because only less than two percent of Taiwanese write letters nowadays, a result of the Internet and telecommunications development, according to Taiwan media reports.

The statistics also show about 278,000 cross-Strait visits, an increase of 18.3 percent, were made via the sea routes between two small islands on the Taiwan side and Xiamen and Mawei of East China's Fujian Provinceon the mainland side, during the first ten months of this year.

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