Following Internet.org’s plan to connect the unconnected we wondered where they all are and a Mobile Phones usage chart from Statista initially seemed to reinforce the under developed / African countries plus theory.
We have now traveled a little further and using the header statistics from the International Telecomms Union (ITU) the UN agency (with inevitably some of our own calculations derived from their data) and conclude that 64% of the “unconnected” are in the Asia Pacific region.
This regional grouping includes Australasia Japan and South Korea where the internet access figures are over 80% and we estimate their unconnected amount to under 40 million and hence less than 1% of the total of 4.3 billion.
The huge populations of China and India (over 2.5 billion in total) are bound to have an enormous influence on the overall figures. According to InternetWorldStats.com at June 2012 the total unconnected amounted to some 1.9 billion which is 44% of the total.