Half billion people have home Internet access
2002-03-09

Category Usage Statistics Nations Singapore

HONG KONG - Nearly half a billion people around the world had access to the Internet from their homes by the end of last year, Nielsen/NetRatings said on Thursday.

The Internet measurement firm said some 498 million people could surf the web from home by the end of 2001, a jump of 5.1 percent from the figure in July-September.

People in Asia continued to hook up faster than anywhere else, with home web access growing 5.6 percent in the last three months of the year from the previous quarter.

Europeans were next, with connections up 4.9 percent, followed by computer users in Latin America and the United States, which had respective growth rates of 3.3 and 3.5 percent.

North America continued to have the largest share of the global Internet audience at 40 percent. Europe, Middle East and Africa accounted for 27 percent and Asia 22 percent.

Of the eight countries the company monitors in Asia, Singapore had the highest access rate. Some 60 percent of households in the island-state of four million people could log on to the Net.

South Korea and Hong Kong ranked second and third at 58 and 56 percent, respectively.

India ranked last with only seven percent of households enjoying Internet access. India's Internet subscriber base is not growing quickly because relatively few people can afford personal computers and access costs can be high.

"In Asia, homes headed by men with university degrees are most likely to have Internet access, while age is not a determining factor," said Hugh Bloch, managing director of Nielsen/NetRatings Asia.

He said the trend was different in Europe and Latin America where household access to the Internet is skewed toward homes where the head of household is 35 or younger. Reuters