From a BBC article sent by Daniel, we find these figures:
| Worldwide: | 12.8% |
| USA: | 68.1% |
| UK: | 62.9% |
| EU: | 49.8% |
| Russia: | 16.5% |
| Ukraine: | 11.4% |
| China: | 8.5% |
| Uzbekistan: | 3.3% |
Also, this comment:
By the turn of the century, Russia had about two million users and now, 10 years later, it accounts for nearly 24 million. At 16.5% of the population, Russia's web community is still small compared to the European Union, where the average is nearly 50%, and about 30% in newer member-states from the east, such as Hungary and Poland.
Which tells us that Internet growth in Russia is running around 70% per annum. At that rate, Russia will cross 50% within 2 years. If the rest of the world is growing at the same rate, it will cross 50% within 3 years. China will be there within months, middle of 2009.
Crossing the halfway mark is strategically important - growth generally has to slow down, and generally it hits a brick wall. You rarely get to 100%, and the US and UK are still stuck between 60-70% - a good working number.
(This is what happened in 2000. Those who saw it coming will recall that PC and Internet sizes both passed the 50% mark around the turn of the century in the western economies. The bubble ended, like clockwork.)
PS: the rest of the article is laughable, a reason in and of itself for reading blogs not traditional news feeds.
Posted by iang at April 12, 2006 06:25 AM | TrackBackSo this tool linked to a network has a growth function that one might correlate with all sorts of other occurrences. Internet usage has increased and advanced the unproductive time of corporate and government employees. The vast amounts of time that are wasted could easily be redirected to smaller labor pools without the internet. The level of productivity has decreased in relationship to services provided online via automated responses that do not address the depth of the human experience. News has become more uniform across venues and lacks real investigative discovery and depth. The internet and the PC have revealed a soft under belly previously unknown the personalized sound bite without content. We read facts and figures yet fail to derive conclusions that mean anything. The growth of users correlates to the sales of network services and PCs as a efficiency promoting, but fail to live up to the promise in results regardless of the usage. The PC can easily be replaced by the pocket television and a two way network replaced by a simple search engine. A good question is do we need a government employee would knows where the best buy is on tires or a well informed receptionist? Perhaps a limited expansion excluding work related locations is the way to go. The growth of the internet would stop immediately and the network would become a smaller world of contributors. The corporate and governmental entities work stop invading with regulatory oversight and people looking to communicate with each other on a more in depth basis restarted. Growth and availability have created more junk and less substance.
The internet has become the static between the channels offering nothing more than sound with no meaning.
Uzbekistan is an interesting country. Its level of literacy is extraordinarily high not only by central-asian standards. It's most influential religion, the branch of Islam called Sufism, does not exhibit the luddite attitudes of some other religions. In fact, the medresse (islamic religious school) in Buhara offers advanced computer science classes for future imams.
While hopelessly poor by GDP/capita measure, Uzbekistan manufactures (and exports) cars, mid-size cargo planes, consumer electronics and industrial equipment, not just beautiful rugs.
Encompassing three major cities of the Silk Route (Samarqand, Buhara and Tashkent) it has a centuries-old tradition of trade and commerce.
While internet penetration is still low, electronic currences are already changing hands at the bazaar:
http://www.emoney.uz
Telecommunication services sold for WebMoney in Uzbekistan:
http://www.pin.uz
Notice the large number of competing GSM and VoIP providers.