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Matthew Vella
The National Statistics Office will be issuing tomorrow its data on internet usage in Malta after the latest Eurostat release failed to incorporate any Maltese data.
A spokesperson for the NSO said the situation was expected to be rectified after the completion of a validation process for the Malta data carried out jointly by Eurostat and the NSO. The data will be in respect of a survey on ICT usage in households carried out this year.
In the EU25, 52% of households had access to the internet during the first quarter of 2006, compared to 48% during the first quarter of 2005, and 32% had a broadband connection, compared to 23% in 2005. At the beginning of 2006, 94% of enterprises with at least 10 persons employed had access to the internet (91% at the beginning of 2005), and 75% of enterprises had a broadband connection (63% in 2005). In the first quarter of 2006, 47% of individuals1 in the EU25 used the internet regularly, i.e. at least once a week, whether at home or at any other location.
The highest proportions of households with internet access were recorded in the Netherlands (80%), Denmark (79%), Sweden (77%) and Luxembourg (70%). The lowest levels were registered in Greece (23%), Slovakia (27%), Hungary (32%), Lithuania and Portugal (both 35%).
The highest proportions of enterprises with internet access were recorded in Finland (99%), Denmark and Austria (both 98%) and the Netherlands (97%). Only in Latvia (80%), Cyprus (86%), Lithuania (88%) and Poland (89%) were fewer than 90% of enterprises connected to the internet.
The proportion of households with a broadband connection in 2006 was highest in the Netherlands (66%), Denmark (63%), Finland (53%) and Sweden (51%), and lowest in Greece (4%), Slovakia (11%), Cyprus (12%) and Ireland (13%). Amongst enterprises the highest levels of broadband connections were recorded in Sweden and Finland (both 89%), Spain (87%) and France (86%), and the lowest in Poland (46%), Cyprus (55%), Lithuania (57%) and Latvia (59%).
At EU25 level a higher proportion of men than women used the internet regularly (51% of men compared with 43% of women), and this was true for all Member States, although in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Finland the gap was only one or two percentage points. In Luxembourg the gap was 21 percentage points (men 76%, women 55%).
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