Grow with Us

 

New Zealand - What Makes You Be So Slow?!?

The telephone wire, as we know it, has become too slow and too small to handle Internet traffic.
It took 75 years for telephones to be used by 50 million customers, but it took only 4 years for the Internet to reach that many users.

- Lori Valigra


Broadband Subscription in Asia-Pacific jumped 50% in 2004

by Parthajit Bhattacharyya

As per provisional estimates by research firm Gartner, Asia Pacific fixed-line broadband connections grew by 50% to around 62 million in 2004.  The fastest growing major Asian market in 2004 was Thailand, which Gartner says grew by more than 1,000%, while the numbers of broadband connections in India, Malaysia, China and Australia at least doubled.

A principal analyst at Gartner noted that the strongest push has taken place in markets that have lagged the region's early leaders in broadband.  That said, even in markets with very high broadband penetrations, growth remained robust and into double figures for the year.  Thailand, a market which was lagging well behind its peers in other large Asian economies in broadband penetration enjoyed the highest growth rate in 2004.  Spurred on by deep price cuts in access charges requested by the Thai government, broadband numbers have climbed to more than 130,000 from just 9,000 at the end of 2003, Gartner explained.  Meanwhile, despite its already huge broadband user base, China, the biggest broadband market in the region with more than 21 million connections, grew by another 100% as it continued its rapid churn of dial-up customers to broadband.  However, overall penetration rates remain low.  Gartner's provisional analysis shows broadband connections reached around 62 million at the end of 2004, compared to 41 million at the end of 2003.  Broadband access technologies included in these provisional numbers include xDSL, Cable Modem and FTTx/Ethernet (including FTTH in Japan).

The world's three leading broadband markets by penetration - South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong - all continued to grow robustly, with Japan now joining this leading trio, the study revealed.  South Korea managed to grow 13%.  Its absolute penetration (against population) is 25%, and its household penetration rate is now approaching 80%.  Last year also saw Hong Kong narrowing the gap with South Korea.  Its absolute penetration rate is now 21.7% and its household penetration rate around 60%.  Japan and Taiwan are now running neck and neck behind Hong Kong with around 15% penetration each.

Meanwhile, Japan lost its position during 2004 as the world's biggest xDSL market to China, but has strengthened its position during the year as the world's leading "high-speed" broadband market, with many Japanese able to access 100Mbps access speeds.  It is the global leader in FTTH deployment and by the end 2004 Gartner estimates that homes served directly by FTTH or by fibre and Ethernet to be over 3.5 million.  Of the region's developed markets Australia grew at the highest rate during the year after substantial price cuts in broadband charges at the start of the year.  On a penetration basis, Australia and New Zealand still lag their regional peers in the richer Asian markets.

As the most developed broadband markets push beyond ADSL technology to VDSL, Ethernet and FTTH, the speeds on offer are rising to ranges of 10-30Mbps and above, with even average services in the 1.5-3Mbps range.  In comparison, broadband in places like India, Thailand and even New Zealand often means speeds of only 128Kbps - 256Kbps possibly up to 512Kbps for most people, Gartner revealed.

Source: digitalmediaasia.com 17 January 2005

Internet Usage Statistics - The Big Picture

World Internet Users and Population Stats

World Internet Usage and Population Statistics

World Regions Population
(2005 Est.)
Population
% of World
Internet Usage
Latest Data
% Population
(Penetration)
Usage
% of World
Usage Growth
2000-2005
Africa 896,721,874 14.0 % 23,917,500 2.7 % 2.5 % 429.8 %
Asia 3,622,994,130 56.4 % 332,590,713 9.2 % 34.2 % 191.0 %
Europe 804,574,696 12.5 % 285,408,118 35.5 % 29.3 % 171.6 %
Middle East 187,258,006 2.9 % 16,163,500 8.6 % 1.7 % 392.1 %
North America 328,387,059 5.1 % 224,103,811 68.2 % 23.0 % 107.3 %
Latin America/Caribbean 546,723,509 8.5 % 72,953,597 13.3 % 7.5 % 303.8 %
Oceania/Australia 33,443,448 0.5 % 17,690,762 52.9 % 1.8 % 132.2 %
World Total 6,420,102,722 100.0 % 972,828,001 15.2 % 100.0 % 169.5 %

Notes:

  1. Internet Usage and World Population Statistics were updated on 21 November 2005.
  2. Click on each world region for detailed regional information.
  3. Demographic (Population) numbers are based on data contained in the world-gazetteer website.
  4. Internet usage information comes from data published by Nielsen//NetRatings, by the International Telecommunications Union, by local NICs, and by other other reliable sources.
  5. Information from this site may be cited, giving due credit and establishing an active link back to internetworldstats.com © Miniwatts International Limited all rights reserved.

Source: internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Your Community Is Online

When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web...
Now even my cat has its own page.

- William J Clinton
 

"Not without my computer!"

Washington - Americans' access to computers and the Internet has grown dramatically over the past 20 months with computers now in more than half of all households, a new government report said.  The share of households with computers rose from 42.1% in December 1998 to 51% in August of this year - a total of 53.7 million households, the Commerce Department found in its latest survey of computer usage.  The number of households with Internet access also soared, hitting 41.5% in August, up from just 26.2% in the previous 1999 survey.

But as in past surveys, the government found a gap with whites and people living in cities much more likely to have Internet access than minorities and those living in rural areas.  The report found that 23.5% of black households had Internet access in August.  While this was up from 11.2% in the 1999 survey, it still lagged behind the rate for white households of 46.1%.

The percentage of Hispanic households with Internet access stood at 23.6% in August while Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders continued to have the largest Internet penetration at 56.8%.

The Commerce Department report showed that computer ownership has been rising steadily, going from 8.2% of households in 1984 to the current 51%.  Internet access in homes has risen from 18.6% in 1998 to 26.2% in 1999 and 41.5% in the August survey. - Associated Press.

Source: The Nation (Bangkok) 24 October 2000

Also see:

bulletComputers in the Classroom - ...the pizzazz of computerised schoolwork may hide analytical gaps, which "won't become apparent until [the student] can't organise herself around a homework assignment or a job that requires initiative.  More commonplace activities, such as figuring out how to nail two boards together, organising a game ... may actually form a better basis for real-world intelligence...  A dean of the University of Iowa's school of engineering used to say the best engineers were the farm boys," because they knew how machinery really worked...

Did I read that correctly?  Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have the largest Internet penetration of all in the US?  What's their secret?

I read in USA Today Monday 2 July 2001 where 80% of graduating university students say they get their news and information from the Internet.  57% get information from the radio, 55% from tv, 39% from magazines, and 37% from newspapers.  The following Friday USA Today reported that the top three search keys used on Lycos were Dragonball, Britney Spears, and tattoos.  This is news?

MIT Mines Digital Generation's Ideas

by Leslie Gevirtz

Cambridge Massachusetts - A group of technology-savvy teen-agers has created a country for children named Nation 1.0 that exists in cyberspace as a forum for children to express ideas and argue their rights.  The cyber country was one result of a weeklong "Junior Summit" hosted by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab.  The conference was attended by some 100 adolescents from as far away as Australia, India and Uganda.  They shared their ideas about technology and world policy with each other and another 2,900 colleagues in 139 countries via the Internet.

The Junior Summit was the brainchild of Isao Okawa, chairman of CSK Corporation (Nasdaq:CSKKY - news), and Sega Enterprises Limited which makes electronic games for children.  Okawa Saturday donated $27 million to MIT for the creation of a centre for children founded on the belief that new digital technologies will drive fundamental changes in education.  The $2 million summit was underwritten in part by Citigroup, the LEGO Group and Swatch.  The last two firms already have products specifically aimed at youths.

Despite the variety of cultures, the teen-agers were able to agree on several basics for their cybernation.  "We believe in ethics rather than laws.  We believe in trust not fear," Mariana Cavazos, 16, of Costa Rica, told some 200 adults gathered at the centre.  "Lying is bad.  You don't hurt another person's feelings and you don't take what is not yours."

Nation 1.0 will have a central cyber bank backed by corporations, government grants and private donations that will provide e-commerce financing to equip schools with Internet-ready computers and network connections.

The MIT Media Lab's major challenge was creating a way for the children to communicate.  "Not everyone has a T1 line," said MIT Media Professor Bill Wright, referring to the direct high-speed Internet connection.  "Some places we went, the kids didn't have phone lines let alone high-speed modems."  The result is a computer program that translates English into 5 different languages within 10 seconds or less and operates on a very narrow bandwidth.

As for Nation 1.0, 15-year-old Nick Moraitis of Melbourne, Australia, said starting Monday he and the others would be doing their best to recruit new citizens.  "We need to populate the country before we can change the world.  It takes more than week to build a country.  We've only just begun," he said.

Source: Reuters Monday 23 November 1999

Nick may have been a bit optimistic - by 2003 the idea appears to have run its course.

The Japan Issue

by William Gibson

Modern Boys and Mobile Girls

For sci-fi author William Gibson, Japan has been a lifelong inspiration.  Here, the writer who coined the phrase "cyberspace", explains why no other country comes closer to the future... or makes better toothpaste

"Why Japan?" I've been asked for the past 20 years or so.  Meaning: why has Japan been the setting for so much of my fiction?  When I started writing about Japan, I'd answer by suggesting that Japan was about to become a very central, very important place in terms of the global economy.  And it did.  (Or rather, it already had, but most people hadn't noticed yet.)  A little later, asked the same question, I'd say that it was Japan's turn to be the centre of the world, the place to which all roads lead; Japan was where the money was and the deal was done.

Today, with the glory years of the bubble long gone, I'm still asked the same question, in exactly the same quizzical tone: "Why Japan?"

Because Japan is the global imagination's default setting for the future.

The Japanese seem to the rest of us to live several measurable clicks down the time line.  The Japanese are the ultimate Early Adaptors, and the sort of fiction I write behooves me to pay serious heed to that.  If you believe, as I do, that all cultural change is essentially technologically driven, you pay attention to the Japanese.  They've been doing it for more than a century now, and they really do have a head start on the rest of us, if only in terms of what we used to call "future shock" (but which is now simply the one constant in all our lives).

Consider the Mobile Girl, that ubiquitous feature of contemporary Tokyo street life: a schoolgirl busily, constantly messaging on her mobile phone (which she never uses for voice communication if she can avoid it).  The Mobile Girl can convert pad strokes to kanji faster than should be humanly possible, and rates her standing in her cellular community according to the amount of numbers in her phone's memory.  What is it that the Mobile Girls are so busily conveying to one another?  Probably not much at all: the equivalent of a schoolgirl's note, passed behind the teacher's back.  Content is not the issue here, but rather the speed, the weird unconscious surety, with which the schoolgirls of Tokyo took up a secondary feature (text messaging) of a new version of the cellular telephone, and generated, almost overnight, a micro-culture.

A little over 100 years ago, the equivalent personal, portable techno-marvel in Tokyo would have been a mechanical watch.  The printmakers of the Meiji period made a very large watch the satiric symbol of the Westernised dandy, and for the Japanese, clock-time was an entirely new continuum, a new reality.

The techno-cultural suppleness that gives us Mobile Girls today, is the result of a traumatic and ongoing temporal dislocation that began when the Japanese, emerging in the 1860s from a very long period of deep cultural isolation, sent a posse of bright young noblemen off to England.  These young men returned bearing word of an alien technological culture they must have found as marvellous, as disconcerting, as we might find the products of reverse-engineered Roswell space junk.  These Modern Boys, as the techno-cult they spawned came popularly to be known, somehow induced the nation of Japan to swallow whole the entirety of the Industrial Revolution.  The resulting spasms were violent, painful, and probably inconceivably disorienting.  The Japanese bought the entire train-set: clock-time, steam railroads, electric telegraphy, Western medical advances.  Set it all up and yanked the lever to full on.  Went mad.  Hallucinated.  Babbled wildly.  Ran in circles.  Were destroyed.  Were reborn.

Were reborn, in fact, as the first industrialised nation in Asia.  Which got them, not too many decades later, into empire-building expansionist mode, which eventually got them two of their larger cities vapourised, blown away by an enemy wielding a technology that might as well have come from a distant galaxy.

And then that enemy, their conquerors, the Americans, turned up in person, smilingly intent on an astonishingly ambitious programme of cultural re-engineering.  The Americans, bent on restructuring the national psyche from the roots up, inadvertently plunged the Japanese several clicks further along the time line.  And then left, their grand project hanging fire, and went off to fight Communism instead.

The result of this stupendous triple-whammy (catastrophic industrialisation, the war, the American occupation) is the Japan that delights, disturbs and fascinates us today: a mirror world, an alien planet we can actually do business with, a future.

But had this happened to any other Asian country, I doubt the result would have been the same.  Japanese culture is "coded", in some wonderfully peculiar way that finds its nearest equivalent, I think, in English culture.  And that is why the Japanese are subject to various kinds of Anglophilia, and vice versa.  It accounts for the totemic significance, to the Japanese, of Burberry plaid, and for the number of Paul Smith outlets in Japan, and for much else besides.  Both nations display a sort of fractal coherence of sign and symbol, all the way down into the weave of history.  And Tokyo is very nearly, in its own way, as "echoic"' (to borrow Peter Ackroyd's term) a city as London.

I've always felt that London is somehow the best place from which to observe Tokyo, perhaps because the British appreciation of things Japanese is the most entertaining.  There is a certain tradition of "Orientalia", of the faux-Oriental, that has been present here for a long time, and truly, there is something in the quality of a good translation that can never be captured in the original.

London, being London and whatever else, eminently assured of its ability to do whatever it is that London's always done, can reflect Japan, distort it, enjoy it, in ways that Vancouver, where I live, never can.  In Vancouver, we cater blandly to the Japanese, both to the tour-bus people with the ever-present cameras and to a delightful but utterly silent class of Japanese slackers.  These latter seem to jump ship simply to be here, and can be seen daily about the city, in ones and twos, much as, I suspect, you or I might seem to the residents of Puerto Vallarta.  "There they are again. I wonder what they might be thinking?"

But we don't reflect them back.  We don't have any equivalent of the robot sushi bar in Harvey Nichols, which is as perfectly "Japanese" a thing as I've seen anywhere, and which probably wouldn't look nearly as cool if it had been built in Tokyo or Osaka.

We don't have branches of Muji interspersed between our Starbucks (although I wish we did, because I'm running out of their excellent toothpaste).  Muji is the perfect example of the sort of thing I'm thinking of, because it calls up a wonderful Japan that doesn't really exist.  A Japan of the mind, where even toenail-clippers and plastic coat-hangers possess a Zen purity: functional, minimal, reasonably priced.  I would very much like to visit the Japan that Muji evokes.  I would vacation there and attain a new serenity, smooth and translucent, in perfect counterpoint to natural fabrics and unbleached cardboard.  My toiletries would pretend to be nothing more than what they are, and neither would I.  (If Mujiland exists anywhere, it's probably not in Japan. If anywhere, it may actually be here, in London.)

Because we don't reflect them back, in Vancouver, they don't market to us in the same way they market to you.  The trendy watch chains of London are the only places in the world, aside from Japan, where one can purchase the almost-very-latest Japan-only product from Casio and Seiko.  Because Japanese manufacturers know that you see them, in London.  They know that you get it.  They know that you are a market.

I like to watch the Japanese in Portobello market.  Some are there for the crowd, sightseeing, but others are there on specific, narrow-bandwidth, obsessional missions, hunting British military watches or Victorian corkscrews or Dinky Toys or Bakelite napkin rings.  The dealers' eyes still brighten at the sight of a tight shoal of Japanese, significantly sans cameras, sweeping determinedly in with a translator in tow.  A legacy from the affluent days of the bubble, perhaps, but still the Japanese are likely to buy, should they spot that one particular object of otaku desire.  Not an impulse-buy, but the snapping of a trap set long ago, with great deliberation.

The otaku, the passionate obsessive, the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur, more concerned with the accumulation of data than of objects, seems a natural crossover figure in today's interface of British and Japanese cultures.  I see it in the eyes of the Portobello dealers, and in the eyes of the Japanese collectors: a perfectly calm train-spotter frenzy, murderous and sublime.  Understanding otaku-hood, I think, is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web.  There is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic.  We are all curators, in the post-modern world, whether we want to be or not.

The Japanese are great appreciators of what they call "secret brands", and in this too they share something with the British.  There is a similar fascination with detail, with cataloguing, with distinguishing one thing from another.  Both cultures are singularly adroit at re-conceptualising foreign product, at absorbing it and making it their own.

Why Japan, then?  Because they live in the future, but neither yours nor mine, and somehow make it seem either interesting or comical or really interestingly dreadful.  Because they are capable of naming an après-sport drink Your Water.  Because they build museum-grade reproductions of the MA-1 flight jacket that require prospective owners to be on waiting lists for several years before one even has a chance of possibly, one day, owning the jacket.  Because they can say to you, with absolute seriousness, believing that it means something, "I like your lifestyle!"

Because they are Japanese, and you are British, and I am American (or possibly Canadian, by this point).

And I like both your lifestyles.

Enjoy one another!

William Gibson is the author of All Tomorrow's Parties, and the forthcoming Pattern Recognition, both Penguin UK.

Source: books.guardian.co.uk The Observer Sunday 1 April 2001

Cosmic Karma

by Marco Overdale, Seatoun

While scientists focused on global warming, believing humanity's puny efforts relevant, the asteroid swooped ever closer.  It struck Antarctica.  The vast ice-shelf melted and half the planet's coastline drowned.  Entire nations vanished.

Survivors tilled new soil, painfully rebuilding old skills and rueing lost libraries.  Few recalled the Internet.

Source: the Book of Incredibly Short Stories selected by Brian Edwards, Tandem Press 1997

For IT-related articles on snooping, usage, the future, e-diaries, piracy, flickers, cyborgs, browsing, trends, jokes, philosophic agents, artificial consciousness and more, press the "Up" button below to take you to the Table of Contents for this Information and Technology section.
 

Back Home Up Next