Nearly 1 billion people around the world are now online. Worldwide Internet usage has grown by 146.2% cent over the past five years. Most users are in Asia, Europe and North America. Seven Asia-Pacific nations are in the top 20 countries for numbers of Internet users, three - China, Japan, and India – in the top five.
Asia leads the world in the numbers of people now on the Internet with more than 300 million users, or 34% of all the world’s online users. But that’s still only 8.4% of the total population across the Asian continent. So there’s enormous room for Internet expansion, particularly among the vast populations of China and the Indian sub-continent.

There are now an estimated 1.5 billion mobile phone users worldwide, expected to grow to 2 billion by 2007. By 2005 the global mobile market was worth US$800 billion. High global growth rates are stabilizing just below 20% per annum. Most of this growth is in developing countries, especially in Africa and Asia. Asia has the world’s largest mobile phone market, China, with 265 million users. Significant proportions of the populations of Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Thailand have at least one mobile phone. Mobile subscriptions are booming in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Pakistan and Vietnam with huge potential for expansion. Children and young people are already leading users of the Internet and mobile phones across the world. As young people aged under-18 commonly make up about half the populations of countries in Asia, Africa and the Middle East, they are likely to account much of the massive expansion of Internet usage in coming years. And they are most likely to use mobile phones, rather than fixed line connections, for their Internet access and other interactive communications.

A 2003 Nielsen/NetRatings survey of eight European countries found more than 13 million teenagers – especially the under-12s – flocking to the Internet, up one third in a year.