Korean households' Internet access rate was 99% last year

The ratio of households in Korea with Internet access stood at 99 percent, while the number of elderly people using the Internet has also increased sharply.

According to "The State of Internet Usage in 2016" released by the Science, ITC and Future Planning Ministry on Monday, Internet access rate by Korean households stood at 99.2 percent in 2016, up 0.4 percentage point from the previous year. The findings were based on the survey of 25,000 households conducted from July to October last year.

This means that all households can access optical LAN, cable modem and mobile services. Korea ranked No. 1 among 175 International Telecommunication Union member countries, becoming No. 1 in ITU's ICT ranking for the second straight year.

In a survey of 61,000 people aged three years old or over, 43.64 million people, 88.3 percent of Koreans, were using the Internet, an increase of 3.2 percentage points year-on-year. This represented a 1.7 million people increase from the previous year, notably led by the increase of 1.36 million people aged 60 and over. The number of Internet using people aged 60 and over was 5.06 million with usage rate at 51.4 percent.

The main reason elderly people increasingly used the Internet was the widespread of smartphone messaging function including KakaoTalk. People in their 50s using the Internet moving on to the 60s were also a factor.

Average Internet usage time of Koreans was 14.3 hours, up 0.6 hours a year ago. Smartphone penetration rate was 85 percent among those aged six and over, up 2.5 percentage points from a year earlier. However, computer distribution rate for households was 75.3 percent, down 6.6 percentage points from the previous year. The figure has been on a decline since peaking at 81.9 percent in 2011.

KakaoTalk with 99.2 percent, multiple responses, Kakao Story with 71.1 percent and Facebook with 61.4 percent were the overwhelmingly used messaging apps and social networking sites, and their usage rates have also been rising continuously.

Sung-Gyu Kim sunggyu@donga.com