SEOUL, KOREA - About a half of the world's population will use the Internet by 2017, according to the "2012-2017 Visual Networking Index" report released by a global communications equipment maker Cisco. The report predicted that 48 percent of the world's population, or 3.6 billion people out of the world's 7.6 billion people, will have access to the Internet in 2017.
The number of people who use the Internet was estimated at 2.3 billion in 2012, a figure equivalent to 32 percent of the world's population. The number of Koreans who use the Internet is also expected to rise to 49 million in 2017 from 47 million in 2012.
Along with an increase in the number of Internet users, the Internet Protocol (IP) traffic worldwide is expected to increase at a rapid pace. The report said that the world's IP traffic, including fixed line and wireless, may reach 1.4 zillion bytes in 2017, a three-fold increase from the figure of 2012. One zillion byte is equivalent to 1 trillion gigabytes.
The speed of broadband is also expected to improve with the average broadband speed likely to reach 39 Mbps in 2017, 3.5 times faster than 11.3 Mbps in 2012.
