Sue Waters

The Australian Census results were released yesterday. Information for the census was gathered by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) on August 8, 2006 (every household in Australia had to complete the census on this night).

Results from the ABS media release on Household Internet connection is shown in the table below:

ABS reports that on the night of the census 58 % of household’s stated they had Internet connections with broadband dominating. Internet connections were higher in Capital cities and connection rates vary with States/Territories. I wonder how much Internet and broadband connections in the different locations are being influenced by the availability of good Internet connection services (e.g. highest in ACT).

As my interest is these statistics is related to e-learning, I would love to see the census questions expanded to include number of computers per household and ability to access of computers outside the household (i.e. work access).

Before I located actually located the above table on the ABS web site, I did locate, download and analyze the statistics for both Australia and Western Australia. Interesting that my analysis indicate a slightly higher Internet connection. Either I made a mistake or they have excluded some data from their final conclusions (e.g. excluded information from overseas visitors).

Here is the link if you want to download information on Internet Connections in Australian as an Excel spreadsheet. You need to click on the location you are interested in, then click on View Census Table and on the next screen click on the Details tab.