Over three quarters of the households in Romania have Internet access

By Andra Beltz
Romania can be proud of the speed of the Internet, but also of access to it. According to the National Institute of Statistics (INS), out of the total number of households in the country, over three quarters, respectively 75.7%, have access to the home internet network, up 3.3 percentage points on the previous year. The proportion of 16-74 year olds who have ever used the internet was 82.3%, 3.5 percentage points more than in 2018. In 2019, of the total households with access to the home internet network in 2019, 61, 8% are located in the urban area.
In territorial profile, the Internet connection was more widespread within the households in the Bucharest-Ilfov region (almost 6 out of 7 households have access to the Internet at home), followed by the West and North-West regions. The lowest weights are registered by the North-East (70.6%) and South-Muntenia (70.9%) regions.
The types of connection used to access the home internet are 78.4% fixed broadband connections (fixed broadband connections), followed by mobile broadband connections (64.2%) and narrowband connections (9.7%).
Of the total number of people between the ages of 16 and 74, the proportion of those who have ever used the Internet was 82.3%, of which 89.4% in the last 3 months. Of the current users, 77.0% use the Internet with daily or almost daily frequency, increasing by 1.5 percentage points compared to the previous year (77.0% against 75.5%).
By development regions, the share of people who have ever used the internet was 91.7% in the West region, which is the highest percentage in the country, followed by the Bucharest – Ilfov (90.4%) and North – West (86, 9%). At the opposite pole are the regions South-Muntenia (77.3%) and South-East (75.2%).
The proportion of men who use or have ever used the Internet is slightly higher than that of women: 83.6% compared to 81.1%, the difference being 2.5 percentage points, increasing compared to the previous year when there was a difference of 1.8 percentage points. The share of people who use the Internet decreases with aging. Thus, the share of people using the Internet in the age group 16-34 years was 95.9% while for the age group between 55 and 74 years it is 59.9%.