Nearly 89% of Pakistanis are offline: Study

India is home to nearly a quarter of the world’s population off the internet, whereas China houses over 350 million

KARACHI: Nearly 89% of the population is still offline in Pakistan, according to a new study by the McKinsey & Company group.

The study, which took into account figures from 2013, says 4.4 billion in the world are still offline with 3.4 billion of these in just 20 countries.



In contrast, neighbouring India is home to nearly a quarter of the world’s offline population. China, renowned for its internet censorship, is host to over 350 million offline people.

A large chunk of Indonesia's population, around 210 million are offline, while about 150 million are offline in Bangladesh. Surprisingly, in the United States, 50 million people still don’t use the internet.

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The study states that majority of the world’s offline population, which is about 64%, live in rural areas where there is poor healthcare, education and employment.



Pakistan has some catching up to do

While the study says only 11% of Pakistanis are online, the figure is only slightly less than the government's official figures which state that as many as 30 million Pakistanis have access to the internet, or nearly 17% are online.

However, only a fraction of those online are connected via broadband internet with the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority putting broadband subscriptions at 3.6 million.

Even with broadband, the average speed of itnernet in Pakistan is much slower than some of the neighbouring countries.

According to netindex.com, Pakistan has an average broadband speed of just 3.2 Megabits per second (Mbps). In contrast India has an average broadband speed of 5.7 Mbps.

Iran, which is known for its severe restriction of online content, much like China, can boast average speeds of 4.2 Mbps.

Only neighbouring Afghanistan has lower speed than Pakistan with average broadband speeds of 2.9 Mbps.

What is promising, however, the average speed in Pakistan has risen from 2.31 Mbps last year to 3.2 Mbps this year.

With the advent of 3G and 4G LTE services this year, the access to and average speed of internet is expected to rise significantly as companies seek to tap into the 80% cellular penetration in the country which has nearly 140 million cellular subscriptions.



However, getting all of the 140 million subscribers access to 3/4 G may not be as easy. The study notes that between 1.1 billion and 2.8 billion cannot get online via a mobile network because they do not live within sufficient mobile network coverage. This is made harder in Pakistan which sees a significant section of the population in extremely rough and network coverage-uinfriendly terrain. Further, areas of Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Jammu and Kashmir were not part of the next generation spectrums auctioned in May this year.