Number of internet users worldwide reaches two billion

The number of internet users worldwide has reached the two billion mark and the number of mobile phone subscriptions has also reached the symbolic threshold of five billion, the head of the UN's telecommunications agency, Hamadoun Toure, said.

The number of internet users worldwide has reached the two billion mark, the head of the UN's telecommunications agency, Hamadoun Toure, said on Wednesday.

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"At the beginning of the year 2000 there only 500 million mobile subscriptions globally and 250 million internet users," he said.

"By the beginning of this year 2011 those numbers have mushroomed to over five billion mobile users and two billion subscribers to the internet," Toure added.

And the number of mobile phone subscriptions also reached the symbolic threshold of five billion, the secretary general of the UN's International Telecommunictaions Union (ITU) told journalists in a separate announcement.

An ITU statistician said that the figure for mobile telephones is related to subscriptions.