The world may be growing more ‘wired’ all the time. China, for one, now has 210 million internet users, just shy of the 215 million in the United States.

But Pakistan, where I am now, is an exception. Only 2.12 percent of Pakistanis regularly use the internet. And many of them are still on slow dial-up connections.

According to this article, Pakistan has barely 3.5 million internet users in a population of 164.7 million. And it has only 13,500 web sites using the nation’s own .pk domain, a paltry sum.

“The reasons of these dismal figures are heavy taxes on computers and accessories, which is creating a negative impact on the Internet subscribers’ base as the Internet users are directly related to the computer growth,” the article says.