China Telecom is the largest ISP in the world with 55 million subs. China Unicom is next with 40 million. To put that in perspective, each of the firms added 9 million new users last year, equivalent to Verizon’s entire subscriber base.

Just two Chinese ISPs serve 20% of world broadband users.

Over the past year or so, Twitter has been arguably the hottest thing in social media. Celebrities are using it as their personal electronic playgrounds, it has been the subject of segments and even entire episodes of network TV shows, and it has effectively become at least a breaking news source for many, many people. So usually, any news involving Twitter is sunnier than South Beach in July.

But, per Hubspot’s latest “State of the Twittersphere” report, Twitter’s growth has slowed over the last few months. In fact, it has waned from double digit growth (13%) back in March of 2009, to 3.5% between October and November.

Of course, it’s kind of natural that after a period of significant growth, things will take a dip. If you think about it, with 13% growth, where they were adding users hand over fist, judging growth rate against a higher user base naturally isn’t going to be as awe-inspiring (or however you want to sensationalize it). Not to mention, Hubspot only sampled 5 million accounts, using the accounts’ creation dates to gauge month-over-month growth (though slowing growth has been the popular finding for most over the past few months).

Either way, it’s perhaps more interesting to see users’ increased engagement with Twitter.

In the past, Twitter had struggled to retain users, but it seems that now, the average user follows more people (329% increase from July 2009), is followed by more people (268% increase from July 2009), and has posted more updates (253% increase from July 2009) than ever before. In addition, Hubspot found that more users are filling out their Twitter profiles – including their bios, locations and website addresses. Plus, just over a week ago, Twitter saw its highest usage day ever. And not one celebrity even died, to boot!

So while Hubspot’s report found slowed user growth (something that similar studies have also found), the usage numbers are at least a promising sign for Twitter.