In the mail on Tele-medicine, what struck me was the figure of 50 M Internet users in India. I feel the same way when I read statistics of other countries as well.
I have always wondered how the number of Internet users in a country is estimated. Over the last 10 years I have been struggling to get to an educated estimate but the range is anything between 5 to 20 Million in Pakistan. I am doing a comprehensive report for setting up Telecenters in the rural areas and despite my long experience in Telecommunications and Internet, I cannot find a sensible and standard acceptable method of finding out how many users does a country or region have. The reason for this complexity for estimating this is because: 1. Each user does not have a registered unique identity like a telephone number hence we cannot make (nearly) neat guesstimates like GSM users. Even GSM users are off by over 20 - 30% since prepaid SIMs do not ensure that every SIM has one user liked to it as people have multiple SIMs. 2. The same issue is exacerbated when trying to determine 'active' and 'inactive' users for this purpose. 3. Most users are pre-paid accounts using scratch cards. But scratch cards are no measure of the number of users. 4. One cannot count e-mail address of local ISPs any longer, since a vast majority uses gmail, hotmail, yahoo or other mail servers 5. The number of users of cyber cafes, Telecenters and other iterant users cannot be counted 6. With HFC, DSL and Broadband in offices and building complexes with local distribution via LANs but having hundreds of users behind a single IP address Hence I fear that the numbers of users given in each country is mostly fiction. Can some one give a proper and standardized method of estimating the number of Internet users in a country, region and world? Or is it just someone conjuring up a number and getting as many people to use this for it becoming THE respectable datum?! The same is the issue with finding the e-readiness of a country by basing it on the number of IP addresses and 'Hosts' alone. What measure is used in different countries - especially in developed and developing economies? I feel that that a standardized and accurate method should be adopted since the status of countries, their own internal development programs and for a variety of other purposes, is now being reckoned based on faulty and uneven statistics of telecommunications usage, specially the Internet. Regards Salman Ansari -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jay Bhatt Sent: Sunday, September 10, 2006 3:39 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [DDN] Doc's prescription for tele-medicine Hi all An articlce about Internet and tele-medicine in India- How is Internet helping tele-medicine to grow in villages of India? An article recently published in Moneycontrol website points out the benefits of Internet in shaping tele-medicine in India. Excerpt:"But now, Telemedicine has got a new lease of life, thanks to the spread of the Internet. With the number of Internet users growing by leaps and bounds (numbering over 50 million as of December 2005, according to Internetworldstats.com and broadband set to explode into Indian homes, the World Wide Web might just be the medicine that the doctor had prescribed for an ailing tele-medicine." Read the full article at: Doc's prescription for tele-medicine <http://www.moneycontrol.com/india/news/tech/docsprescriptionfortelemedicine telemedicine/docsprescriptionfortelemedicine/market/stocks/article/238775> Jay Jay Bhatt Information Services Consultant (Engineering) Hagerty Library, Drexel University TEL 215-895-1873 AOL IM jaybhatt59 YAHOO IM jay_bhatt_98 FAX 215-895-2070 EMAIL [EMAIL PROTECTED] Engineering Resources Blog: http://www.library.drexel.edu/blogs/englibrary/ Jay's Information Initiatives in India community on the Digital Divide Network http://www.digitaldivide.net/community/InformationIndia Jay's blog on the Digital Divide Network http://www.digitaldivide.net/blog/jaybhatt Jay's Journal on LISNews http://www.lisnews.org/~Jay/journal Jay's submissions on LISNews http://www.lisnews.org/~Jay _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message. _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
