Analysing Internet Access in the World

How Much of the World Has Access to the Internet?

Now let's now move on to the competition and challenge.

📖 Background

You work for a policy consulting firm. One of the firm's principals is preparing to give a presentation on the state of internet access in the world. She needs your help answering some questions about internet accessibility across the world.

💾 The data

The research team compiled the following tables (source):

internet

• "Entity" - The name of the country, region, or group.
• "Code" - Unique id for the country (null for other entities).
• "Year" - Year from 1990 to 2019.
• "Internet_usage" - The share of the entity's population who have used the internet in the last three months.

people

• "Entity" - The name of the country, region, or group.
• "Code" - Unique id for the country (null for other entities).
• "Year" - Year from 1990 to 2020.
• "Users" - The number of people who have used the internet in the last three months for that country, region, or group.

broadband

• "Entity" - The name of the country, region, or group.
• "Code" - Unique id for the country (null for other entities).
• "Year" - Year from 1998 to 2020.
• "Broadband_Subscriptions" - The number of fixed subscriptions to high-speed internet at downstream speeds >= 256 kbit/s for that country, region, or group.

Acknowledgments: Max Roser, Hannah Ritchie, and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina (2015) - "Internet." OurWorldInData.org.

💪 Challenge

Create a report to answer the principal's questions. Include:

1. What are the top 5 countries with the highest internet use (by population share)?
2. How many people had internet access in those countries in 2019?
3. What are the top 5 countries with the highest internet use for each of the following regions: 'Africa Eastern and Southern', 'Africa Western and Central', 'Latin America & Caribbean', 'East Asia & Pacific', 'South Asia', 'North America', 'European Union'?
4. Create a visualization for those five regions' internet usage over time.
5. What are the 5 countries with the most internet users?
6. What is the correlation between internet usage (population share) and broadband subscriptions for 2019?
7. Summarize your findings.

🌐 What is the internet?

The internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. By 2020 approximately 4.5 billion people, or more than half of the world’s population were estimated to have access to the internet. Obviously then, the internet is a very common term today and plays a very important role in the everyday life of people.

The story behind the Internet

The internet grew out of a U.S. Defence Department program called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), established in 1969. Its purpose was to conduct research into computer networking in order to provide a secure and survivable communications system in case of war. Several other developments continued to take place including the birth of e-mail and the adoption of standard communication protocols. In 1990, ARPANET ceased to exist and the first commercial dial-up access to the internet became available.

🔖 Executive Summary

• Since the internet’s public adoption in 1990, it has proved to be a useful tool in leading yet another industrial revolution. The report seeks to follow a data-centric approach to analysing internet usage and impact across the world. The findings will then be communicated by means of charts and graphs, formats that are easily comprehensible.

• Internet adoption has been quicker in some countries and regions compared to others. Typically, the more developed countries have a higher share of internet users compared to those of developing countries.

• Countries in Europe and North America generally have a higher percentage of their population with internet access. Interestingly, countries with notable economic growth in the past two decades also show tremendous growth in internet access; countries in East Asia such as China and Japan as well as Middle Eastern countries such Qatar and United Arab Emirates.

• Economic powers in Latin America and Southern Asia notably Brazil, Mexico and India respectively have also seen tremendous growth in access to internet considering their population sizes.

• Africa lags behind in access to the internet generally with less than 20 percent of its inhabitants using the internet.

• The growing trend noticed is that regions and countries with high economic growth and development have high internet access. This could be due to the availability of resources to connect to the internet and also the vast usage of the internet to bring about improvements in the quality of life.

• The data excludes means of connecting to the internet besides broadband connections. The data shows a moderate usage of this means of connection amongst internet users across the world. It is a fairly used internet connection, not widely used or sparingly used.

Data Exploration

Three different datasets were analysed both independently and collectively to gather useful insights. Data was typically clean and hence required no processing. Techniques that were deployed provided useful insights and a much clearer understanding of the use case. The methods used include:

1. Data inspection
2. Visualisation of data records
3. Joining data columns