LONDON: The UAE is the world’s most connected country, the Emirates Media Agency reported on Thursday.
The claim is based on a report by the country’s Telecommunications and Digital Government Regulatory Authority, which said that 99 percent of the population were connected to the internet.
TDRA Director General Majed Sultan Al Mesmar said the report “reflects the digital landscape in the UAE overall and in particular the high level of adopting digital solutions whether in everyday life or government/public services.”
The country was “forging ahead according to the ‘We the UAE 2031’ vision and the directives of our wise leadership to keep digital transformation as an indispensable choice and an economic necessity in light of rapid changes in the world,” he said.
The report, titled “Digital UAE — Factsheet,” found that people were using the internet for a variety of purposes, including social networking, work, research, education, entertainment and shopping.
It said download speeds on smartphones reached 161.15 Mbps in 2022, while the figure hit 207.41 Mbps for fixed lines.
The report said that the Unified Digital Platform, which provides public access to information on government services, received more than 30 million visits last year, while the number of registered users of the UAE Pass digital identity app rose significantly to 5 million.
It found that the country had 10 million active social media accounts in 2022, representing 105.5 percent of the population or 106.6 percent of all internet users. These numbers support an earlier report by proxy provider Proxyrack, which named the UAE as the world’s social media capital.
People in the country spent an average of 2.3 hours per day on social media in 2022, the TDRA report said, while app downloads rose 16 percent year on year to 569 million.
The number of websites registered in the UAE rose by over 46,000 in the year to more than 300,000, while the value of spending on app purchases grew by 25 percent in the period.
