Blocked sites opened by 3m

About 3 million Internet users this year managed to gain access to websites blocked in the Kingdom, an academic has revealed.
Nasser Al-Buqami, an IT professor, said this was a 58 percent increase from the year before.
Meanwhile, he said Internet penetration has risen from 38 percent in 2009 to 64 percent in 2014, and now stands at 18.3 million users. It would be 87 percent within the next five years, according to recent studies, he said.
Young Saudis are the main users, with 72 percent male and 28 percent female. “Riyadh has the highest number of users in the Kingdom at 29 percent, followed by 16 percent in Jeddah,” he said.
Forty-one percent of Internet users in Saudi Arabia are on Twitter. The Kingdom has the world’s highest number of Twitter users in terms of its population size. Indonesia and the Philippines are in second and third places.
With the rise in users, there has been an increasing demand for mobile and home-based Internet and broadband services.
There have been about 20.7 million subscriptions so far this year, for mostly voice communication services and data packages. This also reveals a growth in smartphone usage.