Wednesday, February 4, 2009

When Official Numbers Are Wrong

I was just working on some numbers for Internet usage, and was pulling down some data from the ITU. I noticed the following curiosity in the US statistics:

YearSubscribers% Subscribers
200762 mil21.19%
200662 mil21.19%
200562 mil21.19%
200462 mil21.19%

You, my astute readers, will notice that the only number that changes is the year. Fine, good. But the population has been increasing, so if the number of Internet subscribers has stayed constant, the percentage of the population that subscribes to the Internet decreases (yes, "subscribes to the Internet" is a weird phrase, I know, just focus on the numbers). ITU has something wrong somewhere. Maybe things will change with the 2003 data, I just did 2004. Liveblogging the numbers.