Baku, Azerbaijan, June 10
By Umid Niayesh - Trend:
Over 20 million of Iran's 78 million people are smart phone users, Khosrow Ghobadi, an official with Iran 's Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research said.
Considering the fact that Iran 's mobile network's penetration rate is almost 100 percent, mobile phones are the most pervasive media in Iran, Ghobadi said.
The official further said that the number of the smart phone users is forecasted to reach 40 million by March 2016, Iran 's Mehr news agency reported June 10.
Ghobadi underlined that the center is studying effects of cell phones on Iranians' life style to address the challenges in the field.
Non-official statistics suggest that currently at least five million Iranians use mobile social networks application such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Viber.
Iran's Culture Minister Ali Jannati earlier said that 9.5 million Iranians use the social app Viber and 4 to 4.5 million use Facebook.
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.
The latest statistics of Iran 's Internet Penetration Management Portal put the number of Internet users in Iran at 40 million, indicating that the Internet penetration rate of the country stood at 53.29 percent in June 2014. About 11.07 million of the users in Iran have used GPRS connection to access the Internet over the same period.
Edited by CN
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