On the last page of the Guardian on Saturday (13th Oct) in a sort of ‘interesting numbers’ section, they say that:
“30% of the UK population have no internet access at home”
I couldn’t find the exact source of this, however, another guardian article “UK internet audience rises by 1.9 million over last year” dated Wednesday 30 June 2010 has a similar figure. This says that Internet use has grown to 38.8 million. The National Statistics office say the overall UK population is 61,792,000 with 1/5 under 16, so call that 2 in 16 under 10 or around 8 million. That gives an overall population of a little under 54 million over 10 years old, that is still only 70% actually using the web at all.
My guess is that some of the people with internet at home do not use it, and some of the ones without home connections use it using other means (mobile, use at school, cyber cafe’s), but by both measures we are hardly a society where the web is as ubiquitous as one might have imagined.
See also http://www.connectedkingdom.co.uk/ report by Bolton Consulting Group and Google. It says 73% of households have internet, close to the above figure.