Mobile ownership
Since 2011, the government has been trying to expand the use of Internet especially in rural areas. Today, out of a population of around 83 million inhabitants, more than 76 million have mobile phones, of which more than half are smartphones. Many users own more than one SIM and 4G technology is present in the country.
Since 2013 president Rouhani and his government have been developing Internet services through the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution. By doing so, the number of Internet users in Iran has risen to 73million. On this topic, on 13 and 14 July 2018 the international conference Industry 4.0 was organized in Milad Tower, Tehran. In 2018 a total of 932 cities and 28,000 villages throughout the country were linked to the web.
Up to 60 percent of the population of Iran is aged between 20 and 32, many of them look for new technology and are willing to create startups and develop software. Elders started using smartphones without going through the use of computers. Around 75 percent of the population of Iran is based in urban areas. Mobile phones and tablets are widespread and can be found also in remote areas and among nomadic populations.
According to a 2016 research from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) carried on 328 individuals above the age of 60 in health centers in West Mazandaran, “80 percent of the older people had regular mobile phones and 20 percent had smartphones. In 95 percent of the male and 80 percent of the female participants, the greatest use of mobile phones pertained to making phone calls. A total of 5 percent of the male and 2 percent of the female participants accessed the Internet from their mobile phones. A total of 44 percent of the female and 42.80 percent of the male participants had poor attitudes (with scores from 0 to 40) toward mobile phone use.
As for the different attitudes toward mobile phone use, the highest score obtained by the female participants (71.66 percent) pertained to the psycho-emotional dimension and the highest score in the male participants (72.85 percent) to the instrumental dimension. The results also revealed the lack of knowledge of English as the greatest barrier to mobile phone use in both sexes. There was a significant relationship between sex and the attitude toward mobile phone use in all the three dimensions examined, the sociocultural, psycho-emotional, and instrumental.”