USA tops on internet front: Antarctica not far behind

The CIA World Factbook is a really useful resource for discovering information about places you’ve never been.

We found ourselves on this page that compares countries’ internet hosts, and were astounded to find that Antarctica – not a country at all – is 139th out of 233 entries.

Antarctica is populated largely by scientists from different countries but has a total of 7,764 hosts – far outranking a number of countries including Jamaica, Cuba and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Far outnumbering Nigeria, with a very large population, in 169th place – and Afghanistan, Iraq and the Falkland Islands, too.

Antarctica is also ahead of the Isle of Man – a little island in the Irish Sea –  and way ahead of the Vatican too.

Topping the hosts chart are the USA (505,000,000), Japan, Brazil, Italy and China. Poland, Argentina and Canada are ahead of the United Kingdom (8,107,000), while India – with a population of 1.2 billion folk, has 6,746,000 internet hosts. China, with a similar population has 20,602,000 internet hosts.

Go figure.