An introduction to a new series on the International Telecommunications Union’s latest assessment of the extent to which countries worldwide are successfully becoming Information Societies.
Earlier this week the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) released the latest annual Measuring the Information Society (MIS report), in which it highlights key ICT developments worldwide and tracks the cost and affordability of ICT services. Now in its fifth publication, the MIS report is considered one of the most comprehensive assessments of ICT infrastructure and uptake, which forms the ICT Development Index (IDI) and in the latest edition was used to rank 157 countries.
Over the next few weeks, ICT Pulse will publish a short series of posts highlighting the performance of the Caribbean countries that has been included in this IDI assessment. However, to launch this new initiative, and to begin to provide some context for what is to come, presented below are select findings globally from the latest MIS report:
250 million additional people came online in 2012
Republic of Korea tops ICT ranking for 3rd year in a row
By end 2013 40% of the world will be online – but 1.1 billion households – or 4.4 billion people – remain unconnected
Mobile broadband is now more affordable than fixed broadband
Almost the whole world is now within reach of mobile cellular service
30% of the world’s young population are ‘digital natives’
Broadband is getting faster; 2Mbps now most popular basic package
Telco operator CAPEX peaked in 2008; despite economic upturn investment levels have not returned
By end 2013 there will be 6.8 billion total mobile-cellular subscriptions
An estimated 2.7 billion people will also be connected to the Internet
All countries in the IDI top 30 are high-income countries, underlining the strong link between income and ICT progress.
Between 2008-2012 fixed-broadband prices fell by 82 per cent overall
Of a total of 145 million young Internet users in the developed countries, 86.3 per cent are estimated to be digital natives, compared with less than half of the 503 million young Internet users in the developing worl
In 2012 there were around 363 million digital natives out of a world population of around 7 billion
Almost 80 per cent of households globally had a TV
An estimated 1.1 billion households worldwide are not yet connected to the Internet.
At the end of 2011, there were almost twice as many active mobile-broadband as fixed-broadband subscriptions.
(Source: ITU)
Image credits: Master Isolated images (FreeDigitalPhotos.net); ITU (infographic)
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Interesting statistics! I like the “wordle of statistics”, very revealing.
What I can’t reconcile though, is the statistic of, on the one hand only 40% of the world population are online while, on the other, 80% of households in the world have TV. I thought with falling mobile internet connectivity costs and widening cellular presence, there are more people online than there are glued to TV screens.