Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov.9
By Umid Niayesh - Trend:
The number of Internet users in Iran by June 21, reached 40.046 million, indicates that the Internet penetration rate of the country stood at 53.29 percent, according to the latest statistics of the Internet Penetration Management Portal which is part of Iran's Ministry of Communication and Information Technology.
The number of Iranian internet subscribers stood at 23.567 million in the same period.
ADSL was the most popular Internet connection with about 13.17 million users and 5.268 million subscribers respectively by June 21. The ADSL connection penetration rate was estimated at 17.53 percent in the same time.
About 11.07 million of the users in Iran have used GPRS connection to access the Internet over the same period. The GPRS connection penetration rate was 14.73 percent by June 21.
Some 6.934 million Iranian internet users were connected to the internet via dial-up modems, which indicates that dial-up connection's penetration rate was 9.23 percent. Dial-up connection subscribers in Iran was 3.467 million in the period.
For the time being dial-up connection ranks 3rd among internet connection methods in Iran, while by March, 2009, dial-up connection was the most popular method among users and some 6.782 million connected up this way.
The rate of Optic connectors by June 21 stood at 8.13 percent. Optic connection users and subscribers in the country was 6.1 million and 2.65 million respectively in the period.
Meanwhile the rate of Wimax connection penetration in Iran stood at 3.68 percent, with 2.766 million users and 1.106 million subscribers respectively by June 21.
Iran's northern Mazandaran province ranked first in terms of internet penetration with 92.64 percent, followed by Tehran (76.93 percent), Esfahan(63.29 percent) and Khuzestan(59.01 percent) provinces. The north eastern North Khorasan Province had the lowest rate of internet users in the country with 29.04 percent.
It should be noted that several of world's most popular networks, such as Twitter and Facebook are banned in Iran, while users are still able to access them via proxies. A proxy allows bypassing 'gates' meant to block certain sites.
A survey by Iranian Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports indicates that 69.3 percent of the country's young generation use proxy servers to by-pass the filters and access banned Internet websites.