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The overall speed of internet connections has also risen in the last year.

The number of connections with download speeds of 1.5 megabits per second or more increased from 36 per cent in 2007 to 43 per cent in June.

"As at June 2008, Australia had a total of 7.2 million active internet subscribers," the ABS said.

"Just under 80 per cent of these subscribers had broadband connections."

BROADBAND-CONNECTED Yorke Peninsula will generate an extra $25.5 million in economic benefits for SA over the next five years.

A State Government report has concluded that $2.75 million's worth of federal and state support since 2005 to help roll out wireless broadband to 97 per cent of the peninsula had returned three to four times that amount in financial, social and other benefits.

Report author Systems Knowledge Concepts managing director Simon Molloy said the peninsula's 11,000 residents had been fast adopters of the service – 40 per cent of households and 60 per cent of businesses were now connected, spending metropolitan-equivalent prices of about $39.95 a month for the 1.5Mb-a-second service.

For example, the researchers say that today's needs—which include social networking, basic video chatting, and standard-def IPTV—only require a fraction of the bandwidth we will soon need to do things like like visual networking, HD video streaming, "consumer telepresence," and large file-sharing. These activities will require a download speed of roughly 11.25Mbps and an upload of 5Mbps, which still isn't common in many countries today.

Sweden is a distant second to Japan, followed by the Netherlands, Latvia, and Korea. The US comes just above Russia on the list of countries prepared for even today's online needs, and it appears to have a long way to go before meeting tomorrow's requirements. Countries that don't even qualify for today's needs include the UK, Spain, Canada, and Australia, with Mexico, China, and India at the very bottom of the list.