July 27: Half of the population of the country has access to the internet, shows a new statistics. According to the data unveiled by Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA), 13.27 million people have access to the internet as of mid-April.  

As per the population census of 2011, total population of the country is 26.49 million. The new NTA figure is 50.11 percent of the nation's population. The telecommunication sector regulator has included customers of six telecom service providers and 23 internet service providers in the report. According to Min Prasad Aryal, Spokesperson of NTA development of internet infrastructures and rise of the number of new users are the main reason behind the rapid increment in the number of internet users.

As per the NTA data, the majority of internet users are mobile data users. Nevertheless, broadband internet which is considered a key factor of a nation's GDP has not expanded as expected. The reason behind increasing number of mobile users are infrastructure development and ease of mobile use. Aryal said that NTA is actively engaged in expanding the broadband connectivity throughout the country. “The tasks of developing broadband internet infrastructures have already been initiated. We can expect quantitative increase in the number of broadband internet users with the development of such infrastructures."

Out of mobile data users, 12.74 are GPRS and 3G users, whereas 199,671 are CDMA and EVDO data users. Similarly, 170,701 people use the ADSL service while 47,781 use optical fibre and 9,382 uses PSTN based services.  Likewise, the number of cable modem, WiMax and VSAT based internet service users stand at 84,235 and 14,875 and 13 respectively.

In terms of market share, NTC leads with 55.24 percent of total users. Likewise, Ncell covers 42.47 percent of the market while internet service providers have 1.04 percent share of the market.