Over three quarters of Bulgarians have never used the internet, and 23% do not know what the word means, a survey published in a local newspaper said on Thursday

Over three quarters of Bulgarians have never used the internet, and 23% do not know what the word means, a survey published in a local newspaper said on Thursday. Almost 77% of the EU candidate country’s 8m people had never been online. In May, telecommunications minister Nikolai Vassilev said only 4% of Bulgarian companies used the internet in their daily work and that Bulgarian schools had only one computer for every 200 students. Internet use in Eastern Europe has grown very slowly since the fall of communism 15 years ago, mainly due to widespread poverty that prevents many people from owning computers and paying provider fees. Only around 20% of the people in the Eastern Europe region use the internet regularly, compared with more than half in western Europe alone.