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Europe Net Users Now Outnumber US/Canada

Posted by CmdrTaco on Tue Sep 10, 2002 09:04 AM
from the and-there's-no-signs-of-stopping dept.
News
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."
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  • Ok, this coming from a european based company?
    According to Irish-based industry monitor Nua.com,
    That's like me saying that I did a study that shows that I'm the best.

  • well it's just absolute numbers .. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    get me the relative numbers!

    182 vs. 186 says nothing if you don't know how many live on each continent.

  • Perhaps this poll [slashdot.org] wasn't representative either, then.

  • I love this phrase... (Score:4, Funny)

    by billbaggins (156118) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:14AM (#4227731)
    AOL - the world's largest internet provider - has been assaulting the bastion of European access but has yet to find a dominant foothold in any single country.
    I can just see it... AOLTW's execs in a room with a big map of the world, pushing little plastic computer figurines around, planning their landing at Normandy, carpet-bombing Germany with those *(#$( CDs, sending commando troops east of the late Iron Curtain to aid the AOL insurgency...

    ...from the corner, a small voice pipes up... "Maybe it's the name. Maybe if it were something other than AMERICA online..." But the General gruffly puts the speaker down. "No. Europeans have absolutely NO PROBLEM with the idea of American hegemony. NONE. Shut up and get me more coffee."

  • There are WAY more people in Europe than North America. Even with a much smaller percentage of people online, it makes sense that there are more in terms of pure numbers.

  • CERN (Score:2, Informative)

    by BritInParis (569522)
    oh, and BTW the world wide web was invented in Europe..

  • Percentages would be a more accurate view (Score:4, Informative)

    by phasm42 (588479) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:15AM (#4227743)
    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).

  • Well it's not the UK (Score:3, Interesting)

    by DrSkwid (118965) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:16AM (#4227744) Homepage Journal
    (probably because some of our telecoms companies are yet to understand the internet)

    Ours tried to claim patent on Hyperlinks

    In other news [theregister.co.uk] :
    "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.

  • Europe isn't as homogenous as the US (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ato (44210) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:16AM (#4227760)
    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.

  • Major improvements in UK telcos internet offerings (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wfmcwalter (124904) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:16AM (#4227761) Homepage
    I've recently returned to the UK after spending several years in Silicon Valley. When I left, dialup was metered and broadband unheard of. On returning, I've been pleasantly surprised by the offerings the UK telcos now have for internet access. Unmetered access is common, and at a price & quality equal to that I enjoyed in the US. Options (and prices) for broadband are considerably better than I enjoyed in Silicon Valley. I think the UK telcos (especially BT) finally get the internet.

    <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>

  • Germany (Score:3, Informative)

    by ArmenTanzarian (210418) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:16AM (#4227762) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • I don't understand the poster's point about European ISP not understanding the internet. We have BT, and they freakin' invented hyperlinks.

    All your internet are belong to us now

  • Net usage per capita still higher in US (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Yet Another Smith (42377) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:17AM (#4227770)
    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.
      • 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 [economist.com] than I do.

  • Teletext (Score:3, Informative)

    by tsa (15680) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:18AM (#4227778) Homepage
    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.
  • According to The UN Population People [www.http], Europe has a population of 727,304,000. This is compared to the 270-280 million in the US. So, Europe practically triples the US in size. However, I think that if there were more European net users than US net users, then there would be FAR more hits on varius websites from Europeans than Americans. *shrug* I wonder if this NUA place is counting people that are behind firewalls in business networks and whatnot.

    • The percentile figures are not the point. Simple fact, more Europeans surf the net than Americans. Sure, you can make the stats say whatever you like, but, at crunch time, theres more of us (I'm in England).

      This was not the case until recently, evidently Europe is increasing net usage faster than the US (The US may be approaching saturation.. good for you guys). All in all, this is a good thing for European internet businesses.

      Its not a competition. The US doesn't _have_ to work the stats in their favour.

  • All Hail the /. Weenies (Score:3, Funny)

    by Quirk (36086) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:19AM (#4227787) Homepage Journal
    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.
  • how about asia? they should be close, too. while the % of population online would be much smaller, the base numbers would be much higher.

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MattC413 (248620) <MattC413@hotma3.1415926il.com minus pi> on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:22AM (#4227822)
    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!"
  • 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 [nua.com]

  • Differences in Europe (Score:3, Insightful)

    by repvik (96666) <slashdot@kynisk.com> on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:27AM (#4227874)
    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.

  • Comment from a european (Score:5, Informative)

    by icebear.dk (182125) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:29AM (#4227898) Homepage
    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 :)
  • Things have changed rapidly over here during the past few years, which is what the articles says when it mentions "growth".

    For example, there are now 2 competing broadband ADSL companies in my hometown, one offering 2mbit download, the other 1.5 (2x768). Both are flatrate. Other cities are very similiar, and it's selling itself. One company I know actually stopped all their advertisement because they were getting customers faster than they could handle.

    There are also Internet Terminals next to the public phones in many places, where you can throw in a or two or use your phone card and surf the web while waiting for your train. These, too, have appeared largely during the last year or two.

    Internet cafes seem to be closing, which shows that more people have access at home and just don't need them anymore. Those I know all get their major revenue from online gamers, not from people surfing.

  • It is no surprise to me (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FreeUser (11483) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:38AM (#4227987) Homepage
    It really is no surprise to me. After seeing high speed internet access options dwindle in the heart of one of America's largest cities, Chicago, with DSL speeds decreasing and prices going up, thanks to our governments negligence and deliberate mismanagement [thenewrepublic.com] of our telco industry, and finding to my surprise that rural canada has better quality DSL offerings than downtown Chicago, I am not at all surprised to learn that Europe, which would be hard pressed to mismanage their affairs even half as poorly as we here in the United States have, has taken the lead in internet connectivity.

    I expect Europe will take an even more dramatic lead, once their internet usage reaches parity with the US and canada on a per capita basis. After all, there are some 380 million people in the European Union IIRC, as compared with 276 million Americans and 31 million Canadians. Whether our FCC and our telco industry will ever figure this as a wakeup call remains to be seen ... I wouldn't bet on it, though, as they will likely use numbers like this to dismiss the fact that is apparent to anyone in the US who has tried to get quality high speed internet access: we not only aren't moving forward as fast as Canada, Europe, and likly much of the rest of the developed world, we are actually moving in the other direction, toward slower, less reliable, and less available connectivity.

    Thanks, Michael Powell. Any other industries you'd like to run into the ground while you're at it?

  • Anyone taken a poll of Mexico? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by anzha (138288) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:52AM (#4228120) Homepage Journal

    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...

    • 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!"

    • Re:Don't believe everything you read... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by a2800276 (50374) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:17AM (#4227771) Homepage
      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.

    • Re:Don't believe everything you read... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Rob.Mathers (527086) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:18AM (#4227782) Homepage
      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?
    • 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

    • Re:Don't believe everything you read... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Draoi (99421) <`draiocht' `at' `mac.com'> on Tuesday September 10 2002, @09:19AM (#4227791) Journal
      There may be a significant difference between 'users on-line' and the amount of surfing individuals. Thanks to our punitive [irelandoffline.com] telco [eircomtribunal.com] 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?
    • I know my webstats still show majority from US
      How do you know ? whois on the IPs ? .com, .net and .org aren't necessarily US sites. It depends on your website's language, too - one of mine's in French, 34% of the visits come from .fr domain names. On my english site, only 9% come from .fr.
    • Those of you who have web pages, look at your web stats, where are most people coming from? US probably. I know my webstats still show majority from US.

      That isn't necessarily true. Remember that .com != US. I have quite a few visitors from Europe with .com, .net and .org addresses, for example. I just happen to recognize the DNS entries as being from European ISPs.

      Also, European visitors don't necessarily frequent US sites, and vice versa -- as an example, Germans are going to be all over spiegel.de, stern.de and so on, but probably won't bother much with cnn.com, news.com or wired.com for their news.

      English-language sites still dominate the Net, but the vast majority of non-English speakers of course prefer to read things in their own language, even if they speak English. So your site, presumably in English, won't have that many non-English speaking visitors.

      Cheers,

      Ethelred [grantham.de]

    • Is this meant to be a joke? Maybe I'm missing the humour, or perhaps it's just incredibly arrogant.

      Perhaps we know about NAT as well....

      Simon
    • Actually we also use NAT muchly (maybe more than in the USA, because here in Europe Internet access is rather expensive), and WiFi is getting very popular here as well.
    • Another case of someone needed to be reminded that Slashdot != the rest of the world. Most people, and most internet users, don't even know what NAT stands for, nevermind how to set it up. While it is certainly possible that it affects the results of the survey, it would not have affected the survey all that much. Even then, there is probably a comparable amount of NATed users in Europe as well.
    • 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.
      • 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.
      • 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).
    • Yes! I was just about to post this same observation. Think relative, not absolute here! Yet another example of common innumeracy.

      First of all the population of Europe is over 800 million. The article did not say the EU. Indeed, this report [netstatistica.com] shows non-EU countries contribute to that total.

      Canada and the US together have about 315 million people. This means Internet penetration in Europe doesn't even approach that of North America (which is in fact contrary to an observation in the posted article).

      Of course I'll admit that it is a semi-interesting statistic, although it will be more interesting when European numbers actually pass North American numbers, including Mexico. As it is, the stat is rather contrived.

    • USA is about that, but the EU is about 750 million, not 350 million.

      Simon
    • 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.

      • Re:The US is not ahead in technology (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Lemmy Caution (8378) on Tuesday September 10 2002, @11:21AM (#4228920) Homepage
        Keep the statistics of US wealth in perspective: if you removed the wealthiest half of a percent from the picture, the US population would have about the same income and standard of living as much of Europe and Japan (and you can remove the top half of one percent from Europe and Japan and maintain that parity - the super-rich in the US are simply far super-richer than the super-rich elsewhere, and that distorts the picture of American wealth.)

        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.

        • Re:Big Deal (Score:3, Informative)

          by Yokaze (70883)
          The national unemployment rates of different countries aren't comparable at all. Who is considered as unemployed?

          Try the standardised unemployment rates [oecd.org] 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.

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