Trends in internet and mobile users worldwide

Thursday, April 17. 2008

Following Joe's post about the Unite for Sight conference, I thought I'd share some statistics from a presentation I gave at our panel discussion on 'Global Health and the Internet' on Saturday. I showed three charts from December 2007 showing the status of worldwide internet users (Courtesy of www.internetworldstats.com):

The charts on www.internetworldstats.com shows the total number of internet users worldwide: 1.3 billion. That number has grown by over 1/3 in the past 2 years. So this means that over 1/6th of the world is connected. Africa and the Middle East have much smaller numbers than other regions – but still they total nearly 80 million people:

71% of North Americans are connected. 4% of Africans are connected.

And the percent of growth over the past 7 years has been 920% growth for the Middle East and nearly 900% in Africa.

But that’s just the internet—mobile phone usage is huge in Africa and does help close this gap in connectivity significantly. Dr. Joel Selanikio of DataDyne.org provided us with some very interesting statistics on mobile phones:

Approximately 82 million Africans had cell phones by 2004, and the average annual subscriber growth for Africa was 58%. (ITU 2006 Report)

Mobile devices are a very relevant way to reach a lot of individuals who do not have computer access...and may not in the foreseeable future. Joel encouraged our audience to think creatively about what can be done with these mini computers that so many--even the very poor--are managing to acquire. His group is working in this area, and it is indeed something we must remember as we continue to need innovative, practical ways to include developing country audiences in our online communities, our dialogues, and our global development work. He argues that the technology is there--we just need to generate good ideas.

To put it into context, look at the capacity of the very first computers released in the 1980s, vs. today's common mobile devices:

Then:
IBM PC (1981-1987): 4.8Mhz, 640K RAM
Apple Macintosh (1984): 8Mhz, 128K RAM

[Aside: My dad bought us the first Apple Macintosh in the 1980s and I remember sitting at the desk waiting for the floppy disk to churn and churn while it saved my very fancy papers--which was all it ever got used for. Talk about expensive word processing.]

Now:
Palm Treo 650 (2004-Present): 312MHz, 32M RAM
Apple iPhone (2007-Present): 620MHz, 8 G RAM

I heard recently that today's cell phones have more technical sophistication than the first space ship we sent to the moon.

When we look at these numbers, Joel is right. The capacity has grown astronomically. There surely have to be creative, and perhaps life-saving widgets/tools/uses that can be devised so that the divides between us--north and south, rich and poor, educators and those who need to learn more, health care providers and patients--can slowly diminish.

It's an exciting time to think about what all of this connectivity means in the global health context. Feel free to share thoughts or links!

Posted by Suzanne Rainey in Global Health at 15:34 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Influence covers innovations in communication, Internet technology and strategy to generate influence on important public policy issues. Chris Wolz manages this blog with the help of his colleagues at Forum One Communications, a web strategy/technology firm in the Washington DC area.