This share was at least 90 % in ten countries, with the highest values recorded in Sweden (98 %) and Denmark (97 %). Other exceptions were Estonia, France and Luxembourg, where the highest level of internet access was recorded in cities, but the lowest was recorded in towns and suburbs (rather than rural areas) and Sweden, where the highest level of internet access was recorded in rural areas.Īs of the beginning of 2019, six out of seven (86 %) individuals in the EU-27, aged between 16 and 74 years, used the internet (at least once within the three months prior to the survey date). In Belgium and Malta, towns and suburbs recorded the highest level of internet access, and also in Slovenia, where the proportion of households in cities and towns and suburbs was identical. In Germany, the share of households with internet access was identical across the three different degrees of urbanisation, and for the Netherlands and Denmark, almost identical (one percentage point lower in towns and surburbs in the Netherlands and one percentage point higher in cities in Denmark). The divide between rural areas and the two other types of areas was particularly strong in Greece, Bulgaria, Portugal, Slovenia and Romania, each of which had a lower overall level of internet access than the EU-27 average. In 19 EU-27 Member States, the proportion of households in rural areas with internet access was lower than the equivalent proportions of households in cities or in towns and suburbs. Whereas households in cities as well as towns and suburbs had comparatively high access rates - 92 % in cities and 89 % in towns and suburbs - internet access was somewhat lower in rural areas (86 %). Unsurprisingly, relative stability was recorded in several Member States where household internet access was already close to saturation in 2014, such as Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Denmark this was also the case in Iceland and Norway.įigure 2: Internet access of households, 20įigure 3 shows that there is, to some extent, an urban–rural divide within the EU-27 in terms of internet access. However, Bulgaria - together with Romania, Cyprus, Spain, Portugal and Lithuania - recorded a rapid expansion in its proportion of households with internet access, with increases within the range of 16-23 percentage points between 20. The lowest rate of internet access among the EU-27 Member States was observed in Bulgaria (75 %). The highest proportion (98 %) of households with internet access in 2019 was recorded in the Netherlands (see Figure 2), while Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Luxembourg, Finland, Ireland and Spain also reported that more than 9 out of every 10 households had internet access.
Source: Eurostat (isoc_ci_in_h) and (isoc_ci_it_h)
Figure 1: Internet access and broadband internet connections of households, EU-27, 2009-2019