More than half the world’s population does not use the internet, and high broadband prices keep billions offline, says a UN report issued on Tuesday.
The UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU) said 3.9-billion people do not have home or mobile internet access, a problem most acute among “female, elderly, less educated, lower income and rural” people.
One problem was the price of fixed-broadband access, which despite falling globally in the past decade remained “clearly unaffordable” in many of the world’s poorest countries, the ITU said.
In 2008, the global average price for a basic fixed-broadband connection was $80 a month, and that fell to $25 a month last year, according to the ITU.
But, in poorer countries a fixed-broadband monthly package with just one gigabyte of data — needed to download an average movie — still cost more than half an average year’s pay. With fixed broadband so pricey, mobile internet access can offer a solution to get more people online the ITU said. Mobile-broadband networks technically cover 84% of the world’s population.
But for many it is the cost of the handset, rather than the monthly subscription, which remained the biggest economic barrier to mobile internet access, according to the ITU.
“In 2016, people no longer go online, they are online,” the report said. “Yet many people are still not using the internet, and many users do not fully benefit from its potential.” To increase digital access globally, the UN agency said it needed better data about who was being shut out of the information technology world.
“A data revolution is needed to better understand who uses the internet, where and how,” the report said.
Addressing the problems with the data set predominant for years, ITU said mobile phone subscriptions, long cited as a connectivity indicator, no longer reliably reflected actual mobile phone use.
While there are nearly as many mobile subscriptions in the world as there are people, in some regions up to 40% of people do not own or use a mobile phone, suggesting the huge number of people with multiple subscriptions had skewed the data.
AFP