Sweden tops EU mobile-connectivity league

Swedes use their mobile devices for internet use more than any other Europeans, a new review from Eurostat shows.

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Sweden also has the smallest proportion of people who never use the internet.

Although about as many people in the Netherlands used the internet overall, checking email and doing other online tasks when the user is out and about was much less frequent among the Dutch than among Swedes.

While about 70 percent of Swedes surf the internet when they are outside the home and away from their desk, only about 55 percent of the Dutch do.

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Finland, Luxembourg, Ireland, Finland and Denmark also saw mobile connectivity above 50 percent, but from Austria onwards the usage steadily shrinks.

Romania is bottom of the league with about 5 percent on-the-road connectivity.

Bulgaria, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania were also below the 20-percent mark.

Sweden also had the highest percentage of households with a broadband internet connection -- 87 percent, compared to the EU27 average of 72 percent.

The Eurostat report also looked at what it terms the "digital divide" - looking at the slice of the population that has never used the internet.

Sweden had the slimmest digital divide with one in five Swedes not using the internet, while that figure balloons to 48 percent in Romania at the bottom of the table.

Young people were in general the most connected across the 27 EU nations, with average on-the-go connectivity at around 60 percent, the report from the union's statistics bureau Eurostat showed.

Figures on stationary internet use also reflected this, with 78 percent of the EU's 25-54-year olds using the internet regularly, which shrinks to 42 percent in the 55-74 age bracket.

Young users are the most likely to use social media sites and download music, but across all age brackets the most common activity was emailing - hovering between 80 and 90 percent across the surveyed age groups.

Looking up information on goods and services is also common, with about 80 percent overall using the internet to shop around.

In 2012, 59 percent of internet users reported having bought or ordered goods or
services over the internet for private purposes. The UK topped that list at 82 percent, followed by Denmark at 79 percent, while Sweden came in third with 77 percent.

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