IT market research firm comScore Networks reported on Tuesday that 747 million people aged 15 and over used the Internet worldwide in January 2007, a 10 percent increase from January 2006. China, Russia and India saw the highest rises in online population.

The U.S. still held the largest number of Internet users with 153 million, or 20 percent of the global users, but growth was just 2 percent. China was the world's second largest online community with 86.7 million Internet users (at family terminals), a growth of 20 percent. The figure is lower than the China's official estimate of 137 million, which includes users in Internet cafes and other public locations.

The strongest growth was seen in India, where the number of users increased 33 percent to 21.1 million, which placed India with the eighth largest Internet population, just behind France. Russia saw its number of users up 21 percent to 12.7 million. In terms of overall Internet users, the highest numbers after the U.S. and China were (in descending order) Japan, Germany, Britain, South Korea, France, India, Canada and Italy.

"The importance of the worldwide internet population continues to grow," said Bob Ivins, managing director of comScore Europe. "Internet users outside the US now account for 80 percent of the world's online population, with rapidly developing countries experiencing double-digit growth rates year-over-year."

In terms of the amount of time spent online, Canada led the list, with the average user spending 39.6 hours on the web. This was followed by Israel, South Korea, the U.S. and Britain. All the five countries have higher broadband penetration in family households than China.