Efforts to get more people online stalled

A report was released late last month that more Britons were already online. The data published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) revealed that the online age divide was slowly dwindling down. Since the three months from September of this year, it was found that over 300,000 Britons were able to access the Internet for the first time. It was also revealed that from that figure, 164,000 were adults aged 75 and up.

Age UK charity service director Helena Herklots stated: “The web can help boost finances and tackle isolation by things like saving money on shopping and keeping in touch with loved ones more easily, so it’s great that over four million older people have used the Internet. Of course there are still over 5.7 million people in later life who have never been online, which is why Age UK is running a tea and biscuits week in September. The week gives older people the chance to learn how to use a range of technology like smart phones and computers through taster sessions run across the country.”

However, it seems that efforts to push for more users to get online have been stalled. This is according to regulator Ofcom. There are still approximately eight million Britons who have never been able to access the Internet yet.

Although Ofcom is working to push first-time Internet users to get on the web through the UK government’s Race Online 2012 program, there are many people who actually decline from the offer.

Ofcom also said that the UK’s “global online universe”, which is the number of people who used their computers to access the Internet, dropped in numbers over the past year. The Ofcom report stated: “Based on data collected by Internet measurement company Nielsen, the total Internet audience (using a computer) across the nine countries for which we have data increased by just 2.4% between July 2010 and July 2011. Audience levels have remained relatively flat with minor seasonal changes in the UK, the US, Japan and Australia.”

Ofcom suggested several reasons to explain the sudden drop, such as users who were instead using mobile devices to access the web.

Source – PC Pro