By Adrineh Der-Boghossian, CRRC-Armenia Junior Fellow
An article recently published on Media.am revealed
that the internet penetration rate in Armenia in 2013, according to the
country’s Public Services Regulatory Commission (PSRC), was 45%. How does this
compare with data from the Caucasus Barometer?
According
to the 2013 Caucasus Barometer, 59% of respondents said their household had
internet access. The official government figure is different from not only the
CB data, but also the rate provided by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN agency responsible
for ICTs. According to the ITU, 46% of individuals used the internet in Armenia
in 2013.
The ITU gets
its data from “administrative sources” — mainly telecommunications operators
and internet service providers collected by national regulatory authorities and
ministries. As per the ITU’s Handbook for the collection of
administrative data on telecommunications/ICT: “In most countries, the national
telecommunication regulatory authority (NRA) is responsible for collecting,
compiling and disseminating statistics covering the telecommunication/ICT
services sector.” In Armenia, the ITU has traditionally relied on data provided
by the National Statistical Service, the Ministry of Transport and
Communication, and the PSRC, government bodies that technology scholars and
experts are not inclined to trust as data collection processes have been neither
transparent nor objective.
Furthermore,
“some governments have reason to inflate penetration rates and there are few
checks on this by the ITU,” writes Assistant Professor of Communication at
the University of Washington and South Caucasus technology media expert Katy Pearce in this article from 2012.
There is,
however, other data apart from household internet access that might help to
provide a more comprehensive picture of internet access in Armenia. For
instance, according to the 2013 Caucasus Barometer, 62% of households have a
personal computer and 28% access the internet from a cell phone. Though having
a computer at home doesn’t mean it’s connected to the internet, there’s a good
chance that at least some of those computers are connected to the internet.
Furthermore, recent studies have shown that internet penetration increased in
Armenia primarily due to mobile internet access. Many Armenian internet users,
in fact, access the internet only via mobile device (Pearce and Rice, 2013).
All things we need to keep in mind when trying to determine the level of
internet access in Armenia.
Another,
perhaps more useful indicator is frequency of internet use.
Additional
data can be found by looking at the findings of another nationwide household survey
conducted by CRRC-Armenia in 2013, the Alternative Resources in Media survey. Here too, respondents
were asked about device ownership, and internet use and frequency. Specifically,
47% of respondents said they used the internet in the last 12 months, with 48% of
them reporting they used it daily. Asked about device ownership, 24% of
respondents said they had a notebook, 6% had a netbook, 42% had a desktop
computer, and 4% had a tablet.
The
Alternative Resources in Media survey also asked about frequency of internet
use (with slight variation in the response options):
No
matter how you look at it, the claim that 45% of Armenia’s population are
internet users is simplistic and not wholly accurate. Besides, internet
penetration rates on their own mean nothing if we also don’t look at internet
frequency and online activities. Device ownership is also helpful but not the
best measure of individuals using the internet.
Why
aren’t devices a good way to measure internet use? Well, for one thing, individuals
have multiple devices, and for another, they sometimes share devices (say, a
household computer that several people use). LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and regulation
think tank covering the Asia Pacific, proposes a new model that estimates the
proportion of individuals using the internet based on income and education
level data, particularly in cases where there is no survey data. LIRNEasia
refers to previous research that found the main factors driving internet
penetration are income and education. This paper points to the problems of
relying on ITU data and number of internet subscriptions.
A good
measure of internet use is the activities people do online. The 2013 Caucasus
Barometer asked respondents which activities they do most frequently when
they’re browsing the internet. To find the answer to this question and compare
results from Armenia with those of the rest of the South Caucasus, go to http://caucasusbarometer.org/en/ and use the CRRC’s easy-to-use
Online Data Analysis tool.
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