Over 61% Bangladeshis have no internet access

Around 10.5 crore people in Bangladesh, which is roughly 61.1 per cent of the total population, do not have access to the Internet, says a recent global report.

As of January 2023, over 105 million Bangladeshis were 'unconnected' from internet, making it the fourth largest 'unconnected' population in the world, according to the Digital 2023 Global Overview Report by global data reference library DataReportal.

However, at the start of 2022, around 114.5 million people, roughly 68.5 per cent of the population, did not use the internet. This indicates that more than 9 million new users have used the internet in the past year in the country.

According to the report, India has the highest number of 730 million people who were not using the internet at the start of this year.

Around 51.3 per cent of its population is still unconnected while China comes in second with around 375 million, 26.3 per cent of total population, remaining away from the internet.

In the world, a total of 5.44 billion people used mobile phones in January 2023, equating to 68 per cent of the total global population.

There are 5.16 billion internet users in the world today, meaning that 64.4 per cent of the world’s total population is now online.

Data show that the global internet user total increased by 1.9 percent over the past 12 months, but delays in data reporting mean that actual growth will likely be higher than this figure suggests.