The International Telecommunication Union, ITU released its statistics early on 20th October, 2010 as a part of celebrating the World Statistics Day. It predicts that Two billion people will come online by the end of 2010 which is 2 months from now. The Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) facts and figures reveal that the number of users worldwide doubled in the past five years and will surpass the two billion mark soon.
While the Internet can find its way to the population through many technologies like cable, 2G, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, Wi-Max etc, the total number of people that have access to Internet at home is 1.6 billion currently compared to 1.4 billion in 2009. "With the rapidly increasing high-bandwidth content and applications on the Internet, there is a growing demand for higher-speed broadband connections" says the ITU in its report. Over the past year, there has been strong growth in fixed broadband subscriptions. By the end of 2010, fixed broadband penetration will reach 8% globally.
Classifying its report over developed and developing countries, it says that 162 million of the 226 million people joining this year are from developing countries. However, 71% of the population in developed countries will be online compared to the 21% of the population in the developing countries by the end of 2010. That clearly indicates that most of the people coming online new are from the developing countries paving a lot of growth potential to the communications market.
In the low-income countries where high-speed Internet is out of reach, the mobile telephony is becoming ubiquitous. The report highlights that over 90% of the global population have access to the mobile networks, thus improving the reach of Internet. ITU’s new data indicate that among the estimated 5.3 billion mobile subscriptions by the end of 2010, 3.8 billion will be in the developing world. And as many as 143 countries are offering 3G services commercially, up from 95 countries in 2007. This indicates that the services in the cloud and the cloud computing itself will develop and reach to all parts of the world very soon.
Overall, the price of ICT services is falling, but high-speed Internet access remains prohibitively expensive, especially in low-income developing countries. The relative price for ICT services (especially broadband) is highest in Africa, the region with the lowest income levels. The region lags behind when it comes to broadband access.
The trend from voice to (mobile) data applications is reflected in the growing number of SMS, or text messages sent, which tripled over the past three years to reach a staggering 6.1 trillion in 2010. In other words, close to 200 000 text messages are sent every second. Please see a detailed visual report here.
The growth in the internet market directly means the growth in the devices used for access, growth in the services offered and their quality, growth in the media, growth in knowledge availability and transfer, growth in the markets and only growth.
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