China Will Soon Have More Internet Users Than The USA

Akamai’s State of the Internet report has revealed that China’s internet users are growing rapidly and China could soon overtake the USA in terms of the number of internet users. Based on current growth figures for both nations China should overtake the USA’s number of internet users within around 3 years – so towards the end of 2016. Of course that makes the assumption that internet growth rates stay the same and from what we’ve seen in the past the rate of growth in China is only accelerating each year.

In the world there are believed to be 2.7 billion people connected to the internet but many of them sharing the same IP address or devices (at a household level for example) thus why Akamai’s state of the internet report only registered 0.75 billion IPv4 addresses. If we compare this year to last year there are now 13% more IP addresses connected to the observable global internet . Much of this rapid growth has been driven by China but also Brazil who saw an impressive 44% growth in their connectivity compared to the same period last year. Most advanced industrial economies seem to be growing at a stable rate of 10% or less. Interestingly three countries in the top 10 exhibited a quarter on quarter decline in connectivity – Germany, Japan and Russia so we’re not sure what is going on there.

Image courtesy of Akamai