The number of Internet users worldwide has crossed the two billion mark, said UN’s telecommunications agency head Hamadoun Toure.
There were about 2.08 billion Internet users by the end of 2010, said the agency. In the previous year the figure stood at 1.86 billion.
The number of mobile phone subscriptions also increased to reach five billion, said the secretary general of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union (ITU).
Fifty-seven percent of the users are in developing countries. But the highest density of online surfers is in Europe, followed by the Americas, former Soviet states and Arab nations, according to the ITU data.
According to the data posted by the agency, the estimated number of mobile phone subscriptions worldwide reached 5.28 billion at the end of 2010, compared to 4.66 billion at the end of 2009.
Toure said, "At the beginning of the year 2000 there were only 500 million mobile subscriptions globally and 250 million Internet users. By the beginning of this year 2011 those numbers have mushroomed to over five billion mobile users and two billion subscribers to the Internet.
Fixed telephone landlines continued to decline to below 1.2 billion.
