Middle East is 2nd fastest region worldwide in Internet growth

Although we keep on hearing that ‘the Chinese and Indians are coming’, we’re not doing to bad ourselves!

Apparently, the growth in Internet traffic in the Middle East has doubled every year since 005, and we now stand in 2nd position in terms of growth worldwide, second only to- you guessed it- the Chinese!

What has happened is that connectivity became more available, at lower prices, in the Middle East. And, of course, users have acquired ‘a taste’ for high bandwidth services and now enjoy online video as a daily past-time.

These facts, and more, have been revealed by a telecommunications research and advisory firm, called TeleGeography. This study examines global internet traffic, which is defined as “a measure of how much data are being sent across the world”.
Traffic has increased worldwide by 53 percent in the 12 months to June.
In the Middle East, the number of Internet users has risen 10-fold in the past three years alone!

And, traffic has followed, surging 97 percent a year since 2005.
The only region that has grown faster is South Asia, at an average annual rate of 103 percent.

As expected, the slowest growing regions are the ones that already enjoy high Internet penetration, such as North America, which increased its Internet traffic by more than 50 percent each year on average anyway. To this day, North America is still the world’s largest consumer of internet bandwidth.

Looking to the future, there are fears of ‘bottle-necks’ and infrastructural concerns, similar to Internet blackout that occurred in January and February this year when the under-sea cables got cut. This precarious situation arose because the Middle East is connected to the rest of the world by only a handful of undersea cables.

Which explains why there’s a race to create more cables, and manage them locally or regionally. The report sites this saying that “every major telecommunications company in the region is involved in one or more international cable projects, with more than $1 billion of investment in new capacity announced last year alone.”

It sounds like good news, and it seems these developments will help us finally make the impression we should on the global Internet map!

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