Visualising the Digital Divide
By Shu Takahashi
The Internet has become a cornerstone of modern society, enabling access to education, economic opportunity, and global connectivity. Yet nearly 2.8 billion people have never been online. What drives this gap, who bears its costs, and what can be done about it?
Share of Population Using the Internet
In 2024, 99.8% of Icelanders used the Internet.
In Chad, it was only 13.2%.
Let's go back to the year 1998, five years after the World Wide Web was released.
Through the early 2000s, Internet access spread rapidly across much of the world. The techno-utopianism of the era held that it was only a matter of time before everyone came online.
Yet as of 2023, nearly 2.8 billion people, over a third of the global population, had never been online.
Consequences of the Divide
The Internet has become a key pillar of modern life. For those who remain offline, it means fewer opportunities to learn, find work, and connect with people and services.
Of these gaps, access to knowledge and education stands out, and Wikipedia illustrates this concretely. The website has become the Internet’s de facto encyclopedia and the first stop for students, journalists, and researchers worldwide.
In May 2026, per-person access to Wikimedia websites in the Singapore was 189,900% higher than in Brundi. Some countries block Wikipedia entirely, and so do not appear in this data at all. The divide is not only economic. In some places, it is enforced.
Number of Page Views on Wikimedia Websites in May 2026
Students without Internet access at home score consistently lower on PISA, a standardised assessment of academic performance run across OECD countries for 15-year-olds. The gap exists in every country measured.
In 2022, Australian students with internet access at home scored an average of 501 on PISA reading assessments. Those without scored 428.
This disparity exists in all other OECD countries measured.
Not all Internet access is equal. Many developing countries rely heavily on mobile networks rather than physical cables. While this can cheaply provide wide coverage, it’s often slower and less reliable than cable-based broadband.
Slow and inconsistent connections make it difficult to stream a lecture, load a textbook, or follow an online class.
To download all English Wikipedia pages on Computer Science (909 MB), it would on average take less than 4 seconds in Iceland. In Turkmenistan, it would take close to 6 minutes.
How long does it take to download Wikipedia pages about computing in different countries?
What Drives the Divide?
The divide doesn’t emerge from nowhere. A country’s level of Internet adoption is closely related to its national wealth. Plotting GNI per capita — a measure of average income in each country — against the share of the population using the Internet reveals a clear logarithmic relationship.
Where Income Rises, Connectivity Follows
GNI per capita vs share of population using the internet
This reflects the economics of infrastructure. Building the cables, cell towers, and data centres to bring people online requires enormous upfront capital. The poorest countries often cannot absorb this cost and, as a result, struggle to bring their populations online.
However, the logarithmic relationship reveals an opportunity. Development institutions, including the World Bank and International Telecommunication Union (ITU), are increasingly treating internet infrastructure as core public investment, on par with roads and electricity. A UN analysis found that broadband investment yields higher economic returns in least-developed countries than in wealthier ones.
But building infrastructure is only the first step. Even where a network exists, getting online can still be out of reach for many. The ITU sets a concrete affordability target: broadband should cost no more than 2% of monthly GNI per capita.
Internet Costs More Where People Earn Less
Cost of 2GB mobile broadband as a % of GNI per capita
The chart above shows how countries are measuring up, grouped by World Bank income classification. In high-income countries, the vast majority fall well under the 2% threshold. Switch to lower-income groups, and the distribution shifts to the right. In these countries, many are paying more to access the Internet despite earning less.