Slashdot Mirror
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."
Perhaps this poll wasn't representative either, then.
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).
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
(probably because some of our telecoms companies are yet to understand the internet)
Ours tried to claim patent on Hyperlinks
In other news :
"Take-up of broadband in the UK lags pitifully behind other countries in Europe, according to the latest stats from Nielsen/NetRatings."
UK Govt. sold off the monopoly telecoms company. We could have had fibre to the door from the profits but instead licences were sold to foreign investment. They have spectacularly failed to recoup their investment, not least because BT won;t open up the local loop. I have fibre to my street but copper to the door.
OK hindsight is easy but selling the country's comms to finance slashing income tax wasn't really in the best long term interests of that market.
It is correct that there was a lot of overcapacity of the workforce in the nationalised industries but why it takes private investment to sort it out is a mystery. Reducing expenditure and increasing profits isn't the only way to operate. Providing jobs with lower work rates is good for the emloyees.
The promise of technology bringing more leisure time has come true. The unforseen consquence of that was that the time would not be evenly distributed. We now have millions of people without work and millions of people with too much work to do. Crazy.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Something to bear in mind is that Europe is far less homogenous than the US when it comes to adoption of new tech (and a great many other things as well, I might add). Generally speaking, northern Europe has been on par with the US in internet use since years back, whereas southern Europe is just picking up speed.
This, and the mere fact that the population base of Europe is larger than that of the US means that with time, as the market saturates, Europeans will certainly outnumber Americans (from the US anyway) on the net.
<grumble>Okay, I lived 1/4 mile from El Camino in Mountain View, and stupid PacBell said I couldn't get DSL (toooo faaaar). If you can't rely on broadband in the densest area of the world's technology capital - where can you?</grumble>
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
A large part of the reason that Europe was lagging behind (at least from what I saw in Germany over the summer) is that internet is very expensive. Germans however are nuts for cellular phones (which are often cheaper to use than their home phones) and have ways of downloading music to them and burning that on minidisc. I was staying with a family that had an ISP but still gave me money to go to an internet cafe rather than use their service because it was so expensive. I believe the issue is that the government has allowed a monopoly on all existing phone lines and the only companies that can get around it are newer, like cellular providers.
Umm... Let me guess - your site is in English? Yeah, Europeans speak more than one language you know. You have to think of all the sites out there in French, Italian, Polish, Swedish, German, etc.
Your statement is like me saying "My Swedish web site has more than 95% Swedish visitors, therefore us Swedes must make up 95% of all Internet users, woohoo!"
All your internet are belong to us now
This idea was invented by Shampoo.
Since Europe is still larger than the Gringo-land by a fair amount, a somewhat smaller per-capita net usage stat will put the total number of users ahead of the US. Its still only in small countries with a concerted effort to push the internet that net usage per-capita tops the US. And that may only be in broadband - I don't remember off the top of my head.
The US, between immigration and a rebounding birth-rate, will outstrip the population of Europe before 2050, if current trends hold. But net usage should be around 99% by then throughout the developed world.
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You probably have a US-based webpage, which would account for the number of hits coming from the US. If that's the instrument I would use to measure net population, I'd have to assume that Internet users are composed of nearly 100% Germans, cause the hits on my German site are nearly all from Germany.
I heard somewhere that one of the reasons Europe is slow on the uptake of Interenet is that we have had Teletext since the early 80's, and therefore 'instant news' was regarded as not that big a deal here. Don't know if that's true, and another reason will certainly be the high telephone costs here in Europe.
-- Cheers!
While your webstats might be originating mostly from the US, that is hardly representative of the population of the web. Perhaps your site doesn't have anything of interest to Europeans.
Think about your web activity, I suspect that you mostly visit US- or North America-centric sites. Wouldn't the logical conclusion therefore be that most Europeans mostly visit European-centric sites?
My other sig is funny!
Um, unless you're using geolocation to detect those sites, using things like looking for '.com' and '.net' is highly unreliable. Almost every European company will try to get the .com as well as the local country code domain, and .org/.net as well for that matter...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Ah! A summer away from /. and I return to find the same stagnant backwater mentality. In a world desperately in need of a sense of community and, all the more so, in talking of a technology carrying with it the hope of *communication* the /. talk is of _them_ against _us_. O me, O my it's back to my cabin in the woods I go.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
There may be a significant difference between 'users on-line' and the amount of surfing individuals. Thanks to our punitive telco here in Ireland, I'm severly limited as to my on-line time as our dialup charges are metered per-minute. *And* we've yet to get decent broadband! There may be more users on-line per-capita (I doubt that, too) but they're not on-line as long & thus not hitting as many URLs. Long-winded, but do you see my point?
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
Local American retailers have published a new study, saying that the reason that the economy isn't doing as well as it should be is because there are more people OUTSIDE this country than inside.
A spokesman for the industry has been quoted as saying that it is time for Americans to do their duty, and have lots and lots of sex, especially with an overlooked segment of the sexual economy - geeks.
A spokesman for Slashdot, when presented with this news, was heard to exclaim "Whoa.. sweet!"
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
There are a lot of differences between countries in Europe. Ireland sucks when it comes to internet infrastructure (There's barely broadband available) and the phone system sucks (I'm on a multiplexed line, so I get 16.200bps dialup). And there is no such thing as 'uncapped' or 'flat rate'.
Compare that to Norway where flat-rate, uncapped broadband has been widely available quite a few years, with a VDSL test-project the last year. Or Sweden, where "Bredbandsbolaget" (Dunno if I wrote that correctly) can deliver 10mbps-lines to normal people.
A few telecom companies are confused about internet. The Norwegian "Telenor" started building a *good* infrastructure back in the '70s. Ireland OTOH seems to have a hodgepodge of systems that won't quite work, or works slowly.
Well, I'm sure I've heard somewhere that size matters. Can't remember where at the moment, try Google.
Somewhere in the heavens... they are waiting.
While it's true that you can't make projections about someone else's figures without knowing anything about how the data was collected, i'm halfway willing to call all the numbers pretty bogus unless they came up with a pretty brilliant way to collect the data.
There are scores of people that only have internet access at work and are really 'net users but probably not counted. NAT and wireless are technologies that call the numbers into doubt and also, there is no real way to count users on all the various home or home office setup LANS. Also, there are millions of college students that don't have net access in their dorms (or off campus residences) but have access through college computer labs. The same applies to high school students. Factor in internet cafes, kinkos and the like and you can begin to see that it would be quite difficult to gauge an 'actual' number of internet users.
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
A person is smart, people are deeply stupid
Here in Italy the vast majority of users connect through free dial-up accounts. I don't know if it is the same in other countries, but free access usually mean plenty of registered but unused accounts. It is probable that any telcom group counts every account, even the unused ones, for marketing purpouse. I don't know the situation in the USA, but I bet that no ISP offers free (as beer) wireless or ADSL access. I suppose that here in Italy ADSL is about 1% or less of total connections, and wireless networking is almost absent.
Signatures are for stupids.
No spam? Ever seen 'the birds' of Alfred Hitchcock? Didn't you see the subtle parody of the catastrophic effects of European SMPT DoS? I don't know where are you from, but here in Italy pigeons are not wireless networking. As a matter of fact, we bound'em tight to a rope, so we can quickly retrieve them. It's called DSL (Double Speed Lace).
Signatures are for stupids.
How funny that poll is. If you're going to compare continent to continent, why are the Euros leaving out Mexico and the rest of Latin America. After all, if they're north of Columbia, they're in north america. I've also been told that, once you get past the border region, much of Mexico really is well developed.
I have certainly come across plenty of latin americans in the years I've been online...
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
The EU makes up a little less than half the population of Europe. Most of the eastern European countries aren't members.
I was only talking about the EU. Not the continent. I don't know the overall figures, but the current EU population is around 500M, IIRC. The US is up around 280M right now. And the birth-rate in the US is back around replacement, while Europe is shrinking (down near 1.6). Add to that much higher immigration in the US, and its not hard to see the US overtaking a smaller Europe. However this does not include Eastern Europe, or the Balkans, except Greece.
The Economist has a better explanation than I do.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
This is not a suprising fact. The US is not ahead in technology.
You know I really cannot stand when people say nonsense like this. The US is, overall, the richest reasonably large country in the world (note: I am not even an American! I'm a Canadian, and our purchasing power isn't nearly as strong as the mighty American $), so clearly one cannot simply say "Uh, they're behind in technology!" (which is an especially hilarious comment when a large portion of the world's high technology industry is centered in the US): If they want, they can have the best of every technology worldwide: The best, most cutting edge wireless technologies, with handsets that'll clean your teeth while you talk, and compute the next million prime numbers while they slumber. If there is a technology anywhere in the planet, apart from maybe Osama's garagecave, if the US and US citizens found it palatable and worthwhile, they'd have it.
A more reasonable comment would be "the adoption of certain technologies has not been as brisk in the US as it is in some other countries". For instance, the cell phone networks in North America tend to already have a tough time being profitable, so they don't jump on new, non-standardized technologies at the toss of a coin like they appear to do in Japan (where they bleed money on them at unbelievably staggering rates). US citizens, generally, like paying $100 or less (actually, most like the phones to be free) for handsets, because again it really doesn't matter to most of us: I don't want a colour screen on my phone, I just want something that I can talk to people on.
So, theoretically, each of those super-wealthy types could buy higher tech gadgets than the rest, but in terms of consumer electronics, the hyperluxury set really don't set the pace for economies of scale.
You also may have a lower gross income than the typical American, but your discretionary spending money is probably comparable. The rest of your comment largely holds - that it's a matter of spending priorities.
The national unemployment rates of different countries aren't comparable at all. Who is considered as unemployed?
Try the standardised unemployment rates from the OECD.
The unemployment rate in the EU was 7.4. Canada had an unemployment rate of 7.2, the US had one of 4.8 (2000).
Now, compare the social security system of Canada, various EU states and the US and maybe you know why an unemployment rate of 5.6 is considered "terrible".
Hint: People below poverty line: Canada 10.3%, US 17.0%, Source OECD
Imagine, some people consider poverty as a source of social unrest and criminality.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"