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Rick Martin ยท ยท 2 min read

Asiaโ€™s Internet By the Numbers

japan-computer

Photo: USA Today

We had a little bit of free time this afternoon to dive into some figures about Asiaโ€™s internet that weโ€™ve been meaning to crunch for a while. Internet World Stats updated its Asia figures a few weeks back, and so we jumped in to try to make some sense of it.

As far as which Asian nation has the most internet users, thereโ€™s not much question that China beats everyone by miles, slowly coming up on half a billion. The Chinese are still far better than anyone else at being numerous. The next best is India with about 100 million, though most of those connections are at a much slower speed than their neighbors in the region. Japan a just a hair behind at about 99 million users.

How does each country break down as a percentage of Asia as a whole? I hope you like pie (see right).

But how about internet penetration? Weโ€™ve talked about South Korea before with itโ€™s blazing internet speeds, so itโ€™s no surprise that this uber-connected country tops the list at 81 percent. Then surprisingly we have Brunei popping in with 79 percent, though it only has a population of about 400,000. Getting back to the big boys, Japan and Singapore are right up there with 78 and 77 percent penetration respectively.

Internet Users in Asia Internet Penetration (% of pop)

We get a little nervous anytime that we deal with Facebook metrics, because the figures provided by the networkโ€™s ad tool (and by extension Social Bakers) tend to be a little erratic (see here and here for examples). Having said that, Internet World Stats did present some Facebook numbers too (citing Facebook as the source, we presume that means its ad tool).

As weโ€™ve mentioned on Penn Olson before, Indonesia reigns supreme as Asiaโ€™s dominant Facebook nation. But India is ready to pounce from the number two spot, and the Philippines are just behind in third.

Stay ahead in Asiaโ€™s tech landscape

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Rick Martin

Rick Martin lives in Tokyo where he writes about technology in Japan, China, and around Asia. After writing full-time for TechInAsia from 2011 to January 2013, he moved on to pastures new at The Bridge. He can be reached via his website, 1Rick.com