VeriSign Counts 900 Million Internet Users

VeriSign announced a plan to enhance its 18 geographically-dispersed Internet servers by installing and operating additional regional resolution servers in key locations around the world. The additional servers will boost performance for growing numbers of Internet users in diverse locations around the globe.


Since 2000, VeriSign's infrastructure for .com and .net has supported rapid and sustained growth in Internet usage throughout Europe, Asia, North America and South America currently processing more than 14.5 billion queries each day. In response to this increasing Internet usage, VeriSign is also working with country code Top-Level Domain registries (ccTLDs) and their respective government agencies worldwide to constantly improve the Internet's stability.


Recently, VeriSign identified additional geographic regions of emerging growth in Internet usage including Brazil, Argentina, Australia, Africa, Middle East, India and Eastern and Central Europe. To enhance Internet stability and speed within these regions, VeriSign has developed plans to install and operate additional Internet servers over the next two years.


VeriSign estimates that Internet traffic around the world continues to double about every 12 to 18 months. According to the company, there are currently approximately 900 million Internet users worldwide with 269 million located in Europe, 242 million in North America, 246 million across Asia, and 58 million in Latin America. China, alone, has approximately 90 million Internet users and Japan has approximately 82 million Internet users.


At present, approximately 65 to 75% of all Internet content is in English despite the fact that English-speaking Internet users number only 35% of the world's Internet users. While English is still the most widely spoken language of all Internet users, 14.1% of current Internet users speak Chinese, 9.6% speak Japanese, 9% speak Spanish, 7% speak German, 4.1% speak Korean and 3.8% speak French.