I thought that I would try a rough estimate of how many computers are out there, that WCG could tap into. Currently, there are less than 500,000 computers (devices) worldwide that are part of WCG.

Has anyone else attempted such analysis?

I put data from US and Canadian sensus information for population, # of households, # of households with Internet / high speed internet. I used some of the ratios to guess for other countries (top 5 for now).

These numbers are completely rough and would need further research to better flush out, but what I can say is that the current # of WCG registered devices is roughly 0.5% of the home (i.e. not business) computers with access to high speed internet for the top 5 contributing countries.

The potential in these top 5 countries alone could be around 98 million computers.

Here's some of my rough math (extracted from a bigger set of spreadsheet data):


Country-----population-------Households with Internet
USA---------295,734,134------68,500,000
Canada-----32,805,041--------7,386,750
UK-----------60,441,457------14,995,018
France------60,656,178-------15,048,288
Germany---82,431,390-------20,450,536

Country--CBL/DSL househld----avail WCG home devices
USA--------54,000,000------------59,400,000
Canada-----5,170,725--------------5,687,798
UK-----------9,458,396-------------9,931,316
France------9,491,997--------------9,966,597
Germany--12,899,569-------------13,544,547

-----------------------------Total----98,530,258