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."

well it's just absolute numbers ..

[Anonymous Coward]

get me the relative numbers!

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

Big Deal

[code addict]

Personally, I don't think this is a big deal. How many countries make up Europe? How many people are in those countries? And they're comparing all those to just two countries in North America?

Europe isn't as homogenous as the US

[Ato]

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.

Net usage per capita still higher in US

[Yet Another Smith]

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.

Re:Don't believe everything you read...

[a2800276]

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...

[Space cowboy]

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:More 'Net users in Europe than North America

[Space cowboy]

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

Re:ummm...a little fishy

[Anonymous Coward]

Population on of Europe is > 700M, polulation of North America is arond 300M.

You do the math.

Differences in Europe

[repvik]

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.

It is no surprise to me

[FreeUser]

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?

Re:hmmmm

[soapvox]

Like possibly that we are not the only nation on earth! It'd be great to see the internet become more global and make our (US) sites be more european leaning and actually get some points of view from both sides, not just the propaganda we hear now about things, such as Iraq. Our constitution gives us freedom of speech, lets see what good we can do in the world if we actually used it instead of following like sheep!

Re:The US is not ahead in technology

[ergo98]

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

[Lemmy Caution]

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:hmmmm

[JimFromJersey]

start learning from it's elders how to play nicely with the rest of the world

Sure, we could learn how to treat our neighbors from Englands' illegal occupation of Scotland and Ireland. The English could also teach us how to how to create a geopolitical timebomb from their mismanaged colonial and post-colonial policies. The Middle East, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Sub-Continent are problems of their creation. From the French we could also learn colonial misrule. They must know something, they managed to slaughter a million Algerians. Many of the problems in SE Asia and North Africa can be traced back to French idiocy. The one thing we won't want to learn from the French is how to defend ourselves. The Germans? not even going to spend time on it. The Italians, not too bad but it would be nice if they gave the Ethiopians back their national monuments. Greece? No thanks, I like to play computer games. Hmmm... Belgium, wrong again, the current turmoil in Western Africa stems from their colonial rule. Luxembourg? Never been there, hear it is a really nice place. I suppose we could be like them, the only problem is that sometimes, somewhere, someone needs to get their ass handed to them and while I have great respect for the British military, they just don't have the logistical network or the deep pockets to stand in for the long haul. Well so much for Europe, what about Asia? Japan ... see Germany above ... China, I think the Tibetans might have something to say about that. Sure the US has made some bonehead calls in the past and will probably make some more in the future. However, compared with the foreign policy mistakes by our supposedly wiser "elders" we are pretty damn benign.