Asia's poor consider web access options

People in Asia's poorer nations could soon be using mobile phones as their main means of internet access

The growing power of mobile handsets is making it likely that the majority of people in Asia's poorer nations could bypass PCs altogether, and use mobile phones as their main means of internet access.

"It is likely that PCs and fixed internet will not dominate the mass market in some countries," said Ovum analyst Nathan Burley in a recent report on the Asia-Pacific broadband market. 

"Wireless connectivity, and potentially mobile devices, could easily be the mass market internet access method. The increasing processing power and capabilities of handsets and wireless networks make this even more likely."

While highly wired countries like Japan and South Korea lead the online world, the have-nots in Asia's developing nations lag far behind.

Fewer than three million out of the more than 17 million households in the Philippines have a PC, for example.

Meanwhile, Indonesia, one the world's most populous nations at more than 226 million people, has only 2.5 million dial up connections shared between some 16 million users.

At the end of last year, there were fewer than 100,000 broadband connections in the whole country, according to Ovum's data.

Many consumers in these countries earn only $100 to $200 a month, making even a basic PC an unaffordable luxury.