The age group with most personal mobile telephones in the 4th quarter of 2004 was that of 15 to 24 year-olds, with 93.6% of the total, followed by those aged 25 to 34 with 92.6%, according to Eustat data.

Half of the children aged 10 to 14 also possessed their own mobile, whereas for the 6 to 9 year-olds it was barely more than 1%. Of all the age brackets studied, it was among the 10 to 14 year-olds where there was the greatest increase in possession of a mobile telephone: from 27.1% in the final quarter of 2003 to 50.4% the same quarter last year.

Only 3% of girls aged 15 to 24 do not have their own mobile telephone, compared to 10% of boys of the same age

In the 25 to 34 age group it is also women who possess the most mobile phones, in the 10 to 14 age bracket the differences are only slight, but in the remaining age groups men surpass women.

In the use of computers, there is also some distance between young people and the other age groups: Of the 6 to 14 year-olds, only 5% stated that they had never used one. Of those that had used one at some time, 98% had done so during the preceding three months. Virtually 100% of young people aged 10 to 14 confirmed that they had used one at some time.

Until the age of 35, slightly more women used computers than men, although the most appreciable differences could be found between the ages of 15 and 34 –94% of young women, 2.5 percentage points than men of the same age. From 35 to 44 the rates were similar: three in four people in this age group said that they had used a computer at some time. From 45 onwards, the balance changes to be more markedly favourable to men, since only 23.2% of women had used a computer at some time compared to 36.3% of men.

Two out of five children aged 6 to 14 are Internet users

38.3% of youngsters aged 6 to 14 connected to the Internet over this three-month period, 40% of boys and 36.4% of girls.

Young people aged 15 to 24 were also the age group to connect most to the Internet: three out of four did so over the three-month period. In this group there is a marked difference in user rates as regards the sexes: four out of five girls connected – 83.5%-, 15.2 percentage points more than boys in the same age bracket.

Mentions of job seeking pages rose by 88%, those of travel agencies by 37% and institutional ones by 24%

INFOJOBS.NET and LANBIDE.NET were the pages that achieved the greatest rises in the number of mentions in relation to the second quarter of 2004, 9,000 more for the former taking the figure to 22,600 and 8,200 more for the latter, with a total of 19,200. The INEM.ES page received another 4,400 mentions by Internet users.

Institutional pages as a whole received 24,700 more mentions, with an outstanding rise of 7,600 for the two Basque Government pages, EJ-GV.NET and euskadi.eus. Additionally, ETXEBIDE.NET, the housing service page of the Basque Government, appeared for the first time with 6,000 mentions.

Despite the last quarter of the year not being the most suitable season, travel agencies received 17,400 more mentions than in the second quarter of 2004, rising to 74,400. IBERIA managed 20,200, some way in front of TRAVEL-CLUB.COM, with 8,200 and MUCHOVIAJE.COM, with 7,900.

GOOGLE gained another 31,500 users in the fourth quarter of 2004

A total of 582,100 Internet users aged 15 or over gave GOOGLE as their search engine, 31,500 more than 6 months previously, meaning that it was used by nine out of every ten Internet users in the A.C. of the Basque Country. YAHOO lost 18,800 users and TERRA 3,000. Only HOTMAIL achieved a gain of 4,800 users.