MACAO, March 20 (Xinhua) -- The number of Macao's households using the internet in 2018 increased by 6,600 year-on-year to 175,400, accounting for 90.2 percent of the total households, the special administrative region's statistic service said here on Wednesday.

The latest report from the Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) indicated that the number of households using fibre optic broadband connection continued to rise, up by 11.2 percent year-on-year to 117,500, taking up 67.0 percent of the total households using the internet.

Internet users aged three and above totalled 527,400, a rise of 2.7 percent year-on-year. The internet penetration rate for the population aged between 15 and 24 reached 98.1 percent, up by 1.3 percentage points year-on-year.

Internet use became increasingly prevalent among the population aged between 3 and 14, with the penetration rate rising by 5.2 percentage points to 69.1 percent, the report added.

Meanwhile, 63.7 percent of the population aged 55 and above used the internet, up by 3.1 percentage points. As regards frequency of using the internet, 91.7 percent of the internet users used it daily, a decrease of 2.8 percentage points.

As for the purpose of using, most of the users used it for communication (94.4 percent) and online entertainment (81.9 percent), with respective growth of 0.7 and 0.5 percentage points. The proportions of users for searching information (79.6 percent), and reading or downloading newspapers, magazines (46.0 percent) grew by 26.4 and 16.9 percentage points respectively.

The proportion of households having computer equipment fell by 2.2 percentage points year-on-year to 73.6 percent, equivalent to 143,000 households. The computer penetration rate for the population aged three and above decreased by 1.8 percentage points to 51.0 percent.