With 24.3 million Internet users (out of the population of 89.6 million), Vietnam stood at No. 20 on the list, right after Canada , which has 25.1 million users (out of the population of 33.5 million), Pingdom said in a report published recently on its website http://royal.pingdom.com.

According to Royal Pingdom, there are 1.8 billion Internet users in the world and the Top 20 countries account for nearly 82 percent of the figure. China takes the top spot with almost twice as many Internet users as the United States , who ranks second on the list. A total of 420 million out of the population of over 1.3 billion in China are using Internet and 234.4 million out of 307.2 million Americans are Internet users.

Among the top 20 countries, seven are Asian (accounting for 35 percent of the world’s total internet users); six are European (30 percent) if you also count Russia; and four are English-language countries if you count India.

In five to 10 years, the order in the Top 20 list will be quite different as Internet penetration in countries like India , Brazil and the Philippines is on the rise, the website said.

(Vietnam Plus, 15/8/2010)