ITU: 3.2 billion people are now online

The 2015 version of the annual Measuring the Information Society Report released by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has revealed that 3.2 billion people are now online, representing 43.4% of the global population.

The report forecasts that by the end of 2015, 46% of households globally will have Internet access at home, up from 44% in2014 and just 30% in 2010.

In the developed world, 81.3% of households now have home Internet access, compared to 34.1% in the developing world, and just 6.7% in the 48 UN-designated Least Developed Countries (LDCs).

Data from the report show that growth in Internet use has slowed down, however, posting 6.9% global growth in 2015, after 7.4% growth in 2014.

Nonetheless, the number of Internet users in developing countries has almost doubled in the past five years (2010-2015), with two thirds of all people online now living in the developing world.

It further revealed that the fastest growth continues to be seen in mobile broadband, with the number of mobile-broadband subscriptions worldwide having grown more than four-fold in five years, from 0.8 billion in 2010 to an estimated 3.5 billion in 2015.

The number of fixed-broadband subscriptions has risen much more slowly, to an estimated 0.8 billion today.