ITU’s Measuring digital development: Facts and Figures 2022 offers a snapshot of the most important ICT indicators, including estimates for the current year.
Latest figures show that an estimated 5.3 billion people of the earth’s 8 billion are using the Internet in 2022, or roughly 66 per cent of the world’s population. At the same time, three quarters of the population aged 10 years and over own a mobile phone. On average, in almost all regions the percentage of individuals owning a mobile phone is higher than the percentage of Internet users, but the gap has been shrinking. This is mirrored by the fact that mobile-broadband subscriptions continue to grow fast, approaching mobile-cellular subscriptions, which is plateauing.
The statistics further show that young people are the driving force of connectivity, with 75 per cent of the 15-24 year old now online, compared with 65 per cent among the rest of the population. And while the gender parity score in Internet use, defined as the percentage of women divided by the percentage of men using the Internet is slowly improving, the population of non-Internet users has also become more skewed as women are more often left behind.
The affordability of entry-level fixed- and mobile-broadband services improved in 2022 compared to the previous year. The global gap still remains wide: for the average consumer in a typical low-income economy, the cheapest mobile broadband basket costs more than 9 per cent of their income, over six times the global price.
