In a new report that digests international broadband policies, the ITU has found that services remain too expensive in many countries.

The ITU’s Broadband Commission report has found that in 19 of the world’s least developed economies – mostly in Africa – the cost of broadband exceeds average monthly earnings.

That contrasts with the Commission’s target for entry-level broadband services to cost five percent of average earnings by 2015.

Reuters reports that a quarter of the EU has yet to use the internet.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/14/us-eu-internet-idUSTRE7BD1BM20111214
Almost a quarter of the European Union’s 500 million people have never used the Internet and there is a widening division between the web-savvy north of Europe and the poorer south and east, figures released on Wednesday showed.

The full report created by Eurostat:
Internet access and use in 2011 Almost a quarter of persons aged 16-74 in the EU27 have never used the internet
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=STAT/11/188&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en%3C/p%3E

Telecommunications, which in theory should bind us together, has often divided us in practice. Until the late 20th century, the divide split those with phone access and those without it. Then it was the Web: in 1995 the Commerce Department published its first look at the “digital divide,” finding stark racial, economic and geographic gaps between those who could get online and those who could not.

Over the last decade, cheap Web access over phone lines brought millions to the Internet. But in recent years the emergence of services like video-on-demand, online medicine and Internet classrooms have redefined the state of the art: they require reliable, truly high-speed connections, the kind available almost exclusively from the nation’s small number of very powerful cable companies. Such access means expensive contracts, which many Americans simply cannot afford.

High-speed access is a superhighway for those who can afford it, while racial minorities and poorer and rural Americans must make do with a bike path.

Just over 200 million Americans have high-speed, wired Internet access at home, and almost two-thirds of them get it through their local cable company. The connections are truly high-speed: based on a technological standard called Docsis 2.0 or 3.0, they can reach up to 105 megabits per second

According to numbers released last month by the Department of Commerce, a mere 4 out of every 10 households with annual household incomes below $25,000 in 2010 reported having wired Internet access at home, compared with the vast majority — 93 percent — of households with incomes exceeding $100,000.

These numbers are likely to grow even starker as the 30 percent of Americans without any kind of Internet access come online.

The world at seven billion article at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515
gives information how the number of people have increased over years.

The number of people on Earth has more than doubled in the last 50 years. Where do you fit into this story of human life? Fill in your date of birth to this web page to find out.