Millions across the world still have no internet access: McKinsey & Co

Millions of people across the world still remain cut off from the internet.

Of the 4.4 billion internet deprived people around the world, 3.2 billion living in 20 countries, still do not have access to the internet according to a new 120-page study by McKinsey and Company.

The study reports that India carried 1.063 billion of those unconnected – nearly a quarter of the 4.4 billion without internet. China on the other hand had 730 million unconnected, Indonesia had 210 million, and the Philippines has 62 million.

After making adjustments for size and percentages though, Myanmar had 99.5 per cent of its population without internet connectivity, followed by Ethiopia with 98 per cent and Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of the Congo with around 95 per cent each. The US, by comparison, had 15.9 per cent of its population without internet.

The study also found that those without access to internet faced a number of challenges, sauch as medium to high barriers to internet penetration in the Philiippines.

The study found that in the US nearly 50 million people had no access to the internet, according to the study. That figure, around 16 per cent of the total population of the US, was close to other studies that had indicated that around 20 per cent of US citizens did not use the internet, though  a number of them did so by choice - they simply had no interest in being online.

"But McKinsey suggests the gap is about more that mere interest. While the United States, like Russia and South Korea, has a large population of people who just don't care to go online - a preference that, frequently, relates to age - there are serious issues of affordability and infrastructure, too," the paper said.

"America's disconnected tend to be literate, low-income women living in rural areas, where Internet access is either difficult or expensive to come by. In fact, America's Internet divide can be seen primarily as a class divide: 80 per cent of the country's offline population falls below the poverty line, the highest proportion in any other country except Mexico."