About 77% of Albanian families already have access to the Internet, according to official reports

 Chart of Internet penetration in households and population in Albania from 2016 to 2021

 The Authority of Electronic and Postal Communications in Albania, known by the acronym "AKEP," estimates that approximately 77% of Albanian households have broadband Internet access from fixed lines.

According to the data of 2021, this indicator has increased by 7 percentage points compared to the previous year.

While measured as the penetration rate of fixed internet lines in relation to the population, AKEP estimates that this indicator reached 19.7% at the end of last year, from 17.8% in 2020.

Despite the continuous growth in recent years, the figures show that the gap between urban and rural areas continues to be very high. The data show an average internet penetration rate through fixed networks in Albanian urban areas of 30% and in rural areas an average of 8%. Based on regional data in 2021, it is observed that the districts with the highest rates of urban penetration are Tirana and Korça, respectively with 43.55% and 27.8%, while Durrës is the district with the highest rate of rural penetration at around 23%, followed by from Tirana, Shkodra, and Lezha with 10% each.

However, these indicators should be taken with some kind of reserve, also due to the methodology. AKEP calculates Internet penetration indicators as the total number of fixed connections against the number of households and population. However, the total number of connections includes a significant number of business subscribers, although AKEP's statistics do not provide a breakdown by customer category.

Also, market sources say that the total number of Internet connections may be somewhat overestimated because many operators tend to report a larger number of subscribers than they actually serve. This is mainly done by not deleting from the statistics the subscribers who leave and close the contracts.

Data from AKEP showed that the number of internet subscribers with fixed lines reached more than 536 thousand at the end of 2021. Over the past year, the total number of subscribers increased by 5.6%, while for 2020 the increase in the number of subscribers had been about three times higher, with 16.7%.

Access to the Internet is increasingly becoming a necessity in receiving public services, especially since their provision has moved almost 100% to online channels. But, especially in rural areas, this access is still quite low, due to weak purchasing power that does not encourage investments to expand the network infrastructure. Despite the considerable gap that exists, Albania has not yet managed to build a financing scheme for extending networks in areas where there is no commercial interest from private operators. From the experience of other countries, such schemes are established mainly with direct contribution of the public sector or by subsidizing operators in different ways to invest in these areas.