Europe Net Users Now Outnumber US/Canada

palefish writes "From this article in the Media Guardian: According to Irish-based industry monitor Nua.com, Europe has almost 186 million users, while Canada and the US register 182 million. The difference may not seem substantial, but Europe is still a growing market. I've always thought of Europe as lagging somewhat behind the States in the internet uptake stakes (probably because some of our telecoms companies are yet to understand the internet). So, I don't know about you lot, but this statistic came as a bit of a surprise to me."

Comments

Percentages would be a more accurate view

[phasm42]

The number of internet users in Europe may outnumber those in North America, but the total population also outnumbers North America by over 2 to 1. A quick Google, and I came up with 314 million for NA, and 727 million for Europe. Put in this persepective, NA still has over twice as many people online, but also leaves Europe with a lot of room to grow (and hence probably faster uptake in the future).

Asia-pacific to beat Europe and US on numbers

[Draoi]

Also from Nua;

Asia-Pacific will have more Internet users than either Europe or North America by the end of 2002, according to a new forecast from eMarketer.

The study indicates that there will be more than 180 million Internet users in Asia-Pacific by the end of the year, compared with 175.7 million users in Europe and 167.7 million in North America.

More info here

Comment from a european

[icebear.dk]

Well I don't know if this is true or not, but it sure seems pretty saturated in Scandinavia, where I live. I live in a town with 35K citizens and we have had DSL and Cable broadband available since early 2000. Everywhere I go (except most of the old folks read over 60) I find at least one PC and they are nearly always if not always on the internet. It is also getting into everything now. My homework and stuff from the university (I recently returned there to finish up my CS degree) I can get over FTP, all contact with the teachers and faculty in general is strongly encouraged to run over email. Our enrollment includes an university email address, our enrollment list has not only email but ICQ on it. And this goes for all faculties not just the CS and Engineering ones. There is a lot more (e-learning portal, webmail, information and so on) and they are constantly expanding (currently they are working on getting a complete wireless coverage, while they build the new university down by the sea). The student housings for the entire town offer 100 Mbit internal LAN and a mighty big pipe out (I don't know how big, but it is a leased part of a fiber) with all the student housings organized by the independent student housing organization (the school has no say over what goes on).

So the internet has spread fully around here and again this is just a very small town in Denmark :)