Uzbekistan came online in a decade
A short data study on how fast internet access actually grew in Uzbekistan between 2014 and 2024, and what happened at the point the curve bends.
The question
I wanted a small project outside client work — something built entirely from public data, start to finish: pull it, verify it, turn it into one chart that says something specific. Uzbekistan's internet growth was the obvious candidate. Anyone who has lived here the last decade has a feel for how much changed; the numbers let me put an actual shape to it.
The data
The series is the share of the population using the internet, reported annually by the International Telecommunication Union and published through the World Bank's open data API. No modelling and no estimation on my side — I pulled the raw indicator for Uzbekistan, 2014 through 2024, and matched it against population figures from the same source to convert the percentage into an actual number of people.
Share of the population using the internet — Uzbekistan, 2014–2024
What the bend means
The curve is fairly flat through 2017, then steepens hard across 2018 and 2019. That lines up with a real, documented change: 2018 was when nationwide 4G LTE rollout began, alongside the abolition, the year before, of a 10% tax that had been levied on mobile communications services. Access got faster and cheaper in the same window, and the adoption curve reflects it directly.
Source: World Bank Open Data — ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Database (indicator IT.NET.USER.ZS), and World Bank population estimates (SP.POP.TOTL).
What I'd check next
The obvious next step is context: how this compares to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and the regional average over the same window, and whether the growth is even across urban and rural areas — a national percentage can hide a much slower curve outside Tashkent. That's the next version of this, not this one.