Free Marketing Dissertations - 1 Million By The End Of 2004, Up 20 Percent From The Previous Year As Users
1 million by the end of 2004, up 20 percent from the previous year as users migrate to broadband, according to an IDC report. This can also be linked to the growth of the EU, causing many Eastern European nations, such as Poland and Bulgaria, to industrialise at a high rate.
However, despite Europe’s strong recent growth, North America still has the world’s largest number of Internet connections, mostly due to the fact that the United States was the ‘birthplace’ of the Internet, and although the ‘Eurozone’ is rapidly catching up, America is still viewed by many as the world’s most important, and connected, economy and consumer goods market. Almost all American and Canadian households now have access to the internet, and North America has the world’s highest level of broadband adoption, although the number of broadband households in Western Europe increased by nearly 65% in 2004, twice as fast as in the U.S. (Macklin, 2005)
The Central American nations are lagging behind the U.S. and Canada, however steps are being taken to close this gap. By end-2004 a total of 14.9 million Mexicans were Internet users, up from five million in 2000, although there were only 0.8 broadband subscribers per hundred people in 2004, compared to an OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) country average of 10.2 per hundred. The Mexican government, like many in the region, has been proactive in attempting to widen Internet access and promote e-business, not least through increasing the availability of information made available online by government agencies. (Country Profile: Mexico, 2005)
IDC has predicted that there will be 75 million Internet users in Latin America by the end of 2005, up from 15 million in 2001, whilst online trade in the region is expected to be worth $72 billion by 2005, and will largely be dominated by Mexico and Brazil. (Robinson, 2001) The Brazilian market is the largest Latin American Internet access market, with a total of 22.3 million users at the end of 2004, although 20.1 million of the market’s overall users, equivalent to 90.2% of the total, are still using dial up connections. (DataMonitor (Brazil), 2005) Yet again, government policies and infrastructure improvements are driving the development of the Internet across South America, with Chile being an example of a successful case where changes in government policies dramatically increased Internet access from about two percent of the population in 1998, to 23.8% in 2002. (Hawkins, 2005)
Finally, Australia and New Zealand show similar penetration rates to Europe and North America, with the Australian Internet access market growing by 15.1% in 2004 to reach a volume of 13 million users. However, the level of broadband penetration: 8.
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