According to International Telecommunication Union (ITU) about 69 per cent of the population will be covered by 3G mobile broadband in 2015 as against 45 per cent in 2011.
ITU estimates that 29 per cent of the 3.4 billion people worldwide living in rural areas will be covered by 3G mobile broadband by the end of 2015. Among the four billion people living in urban areas, 89 per cent will have access to 3G mobile broadband. Further, mobile broadband penetration globally will reach 47 per cent in 2015.
ITU underlines that internet penetration has increased almost seven-fold from 6.5 to 43 per cent of the global population between 2000 and 2015. The proportion of households with Internet access at home grew from 18 per cent in 2005 to 46 per cent in 2015. Despite, growing penetration of broadband, four billion people in the developing world remain offline. Of the nearly one billion people living in the least developing countries (LDCs), 851 million do not use the internet.
At present, there are more than 7 billion mobile subscriptions against 738 million in 2000. Globally, 3.2 billion people are using the internet, of which two billion live in developing countries. ITU concludes that fixed-broadband uptake is growing at a slower pace with a seven per cent annual increase over the past three years. While the prices of fixed-broadband services dropped sharply between 2008 and 2011 in developing countries, they have been stagnating since then and even increased marginally in LDCs.
