The Four Big Reasons Why 4 Billion People Aren't Online

Smartphones have been a huge success in connecting billions of people to the internet, but it may be much harder to bring the next 4bn online. Facebook's State of Connectivity 2015 report explains the problems....

It's around 46 years since consumers first started to use online services, and 23 years since the NCSA Mosaic browser started to popularise the World-Wide Web. But more than half the world's population - around 4.1 billion people - are still not using the Internet, according to Facebook's 56-page State of Connectivity 2015 report (PDF). The authors note that "Over the past 10 years, connectivity increased by approximately 200 to 300 million people per year." At that rate, it could take another 15 to 20 years to get everyone connected, but it could take longer. The report points out that there are four major barriers to adoption: availability, affordability, relevance and readiness.

Availability is the first major problem. We can assume that the majority of new users will use 3G and 4G mobile phones to access the net. However, at least 1.6bn people live in areas where mobile broadband is not available. Over 90 percent of those live in the third world: in South East Asia and the Pacific, and in sub-Saharan Africa. Many of them live in rural areas. This is a problem for network providers. It costs them two or three times as much to cover rural areas, but these rural areas have the lowest population densities. Worse, rural third-world people are least able to pay.

If network operators can't even cover remote parts of the UK, USA and other rich, developed countries, what are the odds of them covering large areas of rural India or Africa, where mains power isn't always available? Hence Facebook's and Google's efforts to expand coverage by using balloons or drones, and Microsoft's experiments with free Wi-Fi networks run from solar-powered shipping containers. Affordability is the second major problem. The report says that almost 30 percent of the people in developing countries still live below the poverty line, and 2bn people simply cannot afford to pay for 500MB/month of internet data...