Digital 2011: Sri Lanka

At 85% of the total population, Sri Lanka has the highest rate of rural living out of all the 24 countries in our Digital 2011 studies.

This may be one of the reasons why internet penetration remains below 10%, but also why Sri Lankans have embraced mobile telephony.

In contrast to Pakistan, it appears that mobile access will drive the next wave of internet adoption in Sri Lanka, with the number of people accessing mobile internet services in the country jumping by 169% in one quarter alone earlier this year.

Meanwhile, with more than half the nation's internet users already on Facebook, we expect to see continued growth in social network penetration in Sri Lanka during 2012 too.

Much of the growth in social media usage in the country will likely be driven by feature phones access, but we anticipate telcos in Sri Lanka will make increasing use of free data connections to sites like Facebook (the ‘0.facebook.com’ offering is already available via the country's Mobitel network) as a way of enticing new subscribers and converting them into longer-term customers.

Click here to download a free PDF of the complete Sri Lanka 2011 report (you may need to sign in to SlideShare first).

This article first appeared on the We Are Social Blog.