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Popularity of Internet Cafe
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.
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