One-third of Cambodians online thanks to mobile phones

About one-third of Cambodians are connected to the Internet, with the number of online subscriptions increasing by 31 percent in 2014, local media reported on Thursday.

Auk Dorany, member of the Telecommunications Regulator of Cambodia, said as of January this year, there were just over 5 million Internet subscriptions in the country, up from about 3.8 million at the end of December 2013, The Cambodia Daily reported.

And Dorany said the overwhelming majority of Internet subscriptions were through mobile devices.

"Cambodia has two groups of users, the 'fixed' ones that use telephone or DSL lines, and those that use mobile devices including mobile phones and iPads," he was quoted by The Cambodia Daily as saying.

"About 98.67 percent of Internet subscriptions are from mobile devices."

Javier Sola, director of the NGO Open Institute, said Internet usage in the country was closely linked to the uptake of smartphones, which are cheaper and more accessible than computers.

"To access the Internet, you need a device, computers grow slowly, phones are much faster," he was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

Facebook, popular among young people, is a key driver of the growth of the Internet, said Sola, adding that Cambodians' ease of access to Internet was largely a result of pricing.

"It's one of the cheapest countries in the world for Internet access. You can have all the access you want for 5 U.S. dollars a month. This is very unusual. In a developing country, you pay 40 or 50 U.S. dollars for that," he said. Endi