International Digital Divide Statistics

Statistics for International Digital Divide Organizations

This page provides information that we esteem relevant to international digital divide organizations and community technology centers around the world. We encourage you to start looking into the following two links of the World Development Reports for 2006 and the World Development Reports for 2007.

Source: World Bank World Development Report

The Following are Digital Divide Statistics from the World Summit on Information Society's Website

Internet, Mobile Telephone and Fixed Lines

In 2004, less than 3 out of every 100 Africans use the Internet, compared with an average of 1 out of every 2 inhabitants of the G8 countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the UK and the US).

There are roughly around the same total number of Internet users in the G8 countries as in the whole rest of the world combined: 429 million Internet users in G8, 444 million Internet users in non-G8

It is estimated that top 20 countries in terms of Internet bandwidth are home to roughly 80% of all Internet users worldwide.

Discrepancies in international Internet bandwidth - the critical infrastructure that dictates the speed at which websites in other countries can be accessed - are nothing short of astounding. Tiny Denmark has more than twice the international Internet bandwidth that the whole of Latin American and the Caribbean combined.

The high cost of international bandwidth is often a major constraint, with developing countries often having to pay the full cost of a link to a hub in a developed country. More than 40 countries have less than 10Mbps of international Internet bandwidth, whereas in Belgium, a 9Mbps ADSL high-speed Internet package is available for just EUR 60 a month.

There are still 30 countries with an Internet penetration of less than 1%.

Africa

In Africa, there are still over 20 countries which have a national average of fewer than 1 main line serving every 100 people.

In 2004 Africa had close to 100 million total telephone subscribers, 76 million of which were mobile subscribers. Africa has the highest ratio of mobile to total telephone subscribers of any world region, and has been dubbed "the least wired region in the world".

Africa’s mobile cellular growth rate has been the highest of any region over the past 5 years, averaging close to 60% year on year. The total number of mobile subscribers continent-wide at end 2004 was 76 million.

America

The America’s region’s three largest fixed telephone networks – in the US, Canada and Brazil – account for more than 80% of all fixed lines on the two continents.

The US has more than twice as many Internet users than the remaining 42 countries in the America region put together.

Surprisingly, the Americas region has the world’s lowest number of mobile subscribers as a ratio of total telephone subscribers, at just 55%. This is because of the relatively high teledensity (60%) and relatively low mobile penetration rate in North America (60%). By way of comparison, mobile penetration has already surpassed 100% in several European countries.

Asia-Pacific

Internet penetration ranges from below 1% in countries like Bangladesh, Cambodia and Lao, to above 65% in countries like Australia and the Republic of Korea. Mobile penetration ranges from below 1% in countries like Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal and Papua New Guinea to 90% or more in countries like Hong Kong (China) and Singapore.

India has overtaken China to become one of the region’s fastest-growing mobile markets, with growth rates of over 90% per annum every year since 1999. With just total mobile penetration rates of just over 4%, potential for growth is enormous.

Europe & CIS

Europe leads the world in terms of mobile penetration, with over 570 million subscribers and a mobile penetration of over 70%This compares with 9% mobile penetration in Africa, 42% in the Americas, and 19% in Asia Pacific.

By the end of 2004, almost all countries Europe had more mobile subscribers than fixed phone lines.

Russia is Europe’s fastest growing mobile market, with the number of cellular subscribers more than doubling during 2004 from 36.5 million to 74.4 million. During 2004, Russia overtook Germany, France, Spain and the UK to become the largest mobile market in Europe.

Despite Russia’s impressive subscriber numbers, it has its own digital divide, with the vast majority of subscribers located in large urban centers.

Global Internet Comparison

The Following are Worldwide Digital Divide Statistics from the internetworldstats.com