China is not only the largest nation on the planet, these days it’s also by far the largest on the Internet (which wasn’t always the case). It has twice as many Internet users as the United States. And it’s only getting started.

The current situation is as follows:

• Mainland China has 485 million Internet users.
• If you also include Hong Kong, that number rises to 490 million.
• That is 23% of the world’s 2.1 billion Internet users.
• The nearest country after China is the United States, with 245 million Internet users. That is, as we mentioned, half of what China has.

And yet China only has an Internet penetration of 36.3%. In other words, barely a third of its population uses the Internet. That’s very low compared to many other countries, for example the United States, which has an Internet penetration of 78.2%, or the United Kingdom with 82%.

Although China’s population isn’t expected to grow much over the coming decade due to quite aggressive population control, it’s already huge at 1.34 billion. That’s almost one fifth of the world’s population (6.94 billion) and a huge pool of potential Internet users.

China’s capacity for growth

That low Internet penetration coupled with China’s huge population means that the country’s presence on the Internet has plenty of room to grow.

If China today had the same Internet penetration as the United States, it would have over a billion Internet users.

We all know that China’s economy is developing at a frenetic pace, and the Chinese state has placed a strong emphasis on developing the country’s Internet infrastructure. A growing share of its population will have access to the Internet, of that there can be no doubt. A big question remains, though.

An assumption, and China’s record so far

This post of course makes one big assumption, and that is that China can reach the same level of Internet penetration currently enjoyed by countries like the United States and the United Kingdom. China has a huge population its own set of unique challenges, so it may be a long time before this happens. In fact, it may never happen. We don’t have that kind of crystal ball.

However, if you have any doubt about China’s capacity for growth on the Internet, let’s end this post with a brief look at how China’s position on the Internet changed between 2000 and 2010. Back in the year 2000, China had just 22.5 million Internet users. Ten years later, that number had risen to 420 million. And now, just a year later, it’s up to 485 million.

So even though China has just scratched the surface of its potential, it’s already an Internet superpower.

Data source: Internet World Stats for Internet usage numbers.

Perceptions matter, and the perception of Nokia in the news, on the web, and in the minds of many, is that things aren’t going that well. Even in the Pingdom office, we hear “Nokia is doomed,” but do the numbers support this belief?

Looking at the statistics, Symbian leads the mobile operating system race with just over 30% of web browsing traffic. That’s down slightly from late last year, when we noted that Symbian finished 2011 as the top mobile operating system, with almost 34% of the mobile OS market.

What is even more interesting, however, is that Nokia is also ahead when we look at figures for all the mobile handset vendors. In fact, Nokia is way ahead of Apple, and Android lags far behind.

Read more

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we talk mainly about Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Some fresh research shows an increase in smaller, more targeted DDoS attacks, and hacker group Anonymous has vowed to take down the Internet by launching a DDoS attack on the 13 root DNS servers.

Read more

Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on OpenStack.

Read more

By some measures, more than 7 billion people now inhabit the world, and more than a third of us are on the Internet. But how many are added each day, each week, or each minute? We think we have a pretty good idea.

Read on for some pretty amazing numbers.

Read more

Pingdom’s Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, security, and mobile stuff.

In this show, we can finally talk about Saleh’s Carbon for Windows Phone app being available in Windows Marketplace. We also talk to Rich Brueckner of InsideHPC.com about the world of supercomputers.

Read more