This article is more than 1 year old

UK top dog for home Wi-Fi usage... almost

Ahead of all... except South Korea

Britain is second only to South Korea when it comes to the proportion of homes that have their own wireless network, we learned today.

While 80.3 per cent of South Korean homes have a WLAN in place to provide internet access to a range of stationary and mobile gadgets, so do 73.3 per cent of UK homes, market watcher Strategy Analytics calculates.

That puts Brits ahead of fellow European countries Germany (71.7 per cent), France (71.6 per cent), Italy (61.8 per cent) and Spain (57.1 per cent).

Even techno-fettishist nation Japan can only count 68.4 per cent of its homes among the world's Wi-Fi households. The US is well down the list with a 61 per cent score, behind Canada's 67.8 per cent, according to SA's numbers.

The best Australia can manage is 53.8 per cent.

Focus on the number of installations, rather than the percentage of homes with Wi-Fi, and China tops the list, followed by the US and Canada.

By the end of 2011, SA said, 439m households worldwide had installed home Wi-Fi networks - effectively a quarter of all households.

By 2016, that total will have risen to 800m, a penetration rate of 42 per cent. Almost 14 per cent of them will be in China. ®

More about

More about

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like