According to a report by research firm Media Metrix Canada, this country is now the world leader in Web surfing.

Last month, Canadians averaged 932 minutes, or 15.5 hours, online at home. That's almost an hour longer than Americans, who had the second highest average. The survey covered 13 countries.

If we can clock that much time in April, imagine how well we can do in December.

``There's more broadband usage in Canada than in the U.S.,'' said Lisa Eaton, vice-president and general manager of Media Metrix Canada.

``The Internet infrastructure's really good in Canada and we have fairly competitive rates, so it's easy for people to afford to go online.''

Swiss users ranked last in the survey, averaging a meagre 353 minutes online last month.

There weren't a lot of Canadians making the leap online last year; the number of Canadian surfers has grown by just 14 per cent in a year.

But those who were wired more than made up for it. The average amount of time users spent online increased by 82 per cent during the same period.

Canadian women rose to the challenge, spending an average of 955 minutes online last month - almost an hour more than their male counterparts.

The typical Canadian Web surfer logs on at home about 13 times a month and spends about 70 minutes online during each session.

In total, Canadians spent about 12.7 billion minutes surfing the Web from home in April.

Most of that time was spent using online applications such as e-mail messaging and file swapping or playing games.

Meanwhile, a new study by Ipsos-Reid put Canada in a virtual tie with Taiwan for downloading music from the Internet. In both countries, 76 per cent of Internet users between 18 and 24 years old have downloaded tunes.

Media Metrix's list of most popular Web sites included the usual suspects. Microsoft Corp.'s sites took the Number 1 spot, followed by the AOL Time Warner Inc. network, Yahoo Inc.'s sites and the Sympatico-Lycos network.

Media Metrix used tracking software to monitor the surfing habits of about 6,000 volunteers from across Canada. In the United States the survey size was much larger, with approximately 55,000 volunteers taking part.

Iceland, where more than 40 per cent of the population has Internet access, was not included in the survey.

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