More than 72,000 people are expected to attend the Web Summit in Lisbon over the next three days.

It is the first year that the technology conference has been held outside of its home city of Dublin, following the announcement last year that it was moving abroad.

The Web Summit cited the size of the RDS venue and issues regarding transport, wifi and hotels as its reason for relocating.

This year’s event is estimated to host nearly double the amount of attendees.

The impressive purpose-built conference centre and neighbouring arena will host more than 600 speakers including Chief Technology Officer of Facebook, Mike Schroepfer as well as footballers Ronaldinho and Luis Figo.

Despite complaints about the wifi in Dublin, the opening ceremony last night did appear to suffer similar issues.

Web Summit co-founder Paddy Cosgrave's attempt to do a Facebook Live broadcast from the stage fell flat when his wifi connection did not work.

He did however manage it later, with a Web Summit spokesperson explaining Mr Cosgrave had initially accidentally connected to the wrong network.

Online gender gap highlighted in poorest nations

Meanwhile, almost a third fewer women than men in the world's poorest countries are connected to the internet and the gap is set to widen, limiting access to life-changing opportunities.

A study by the ONE organisation, co-founded by U2’s Bono to tackle extreme poverty, found 18% of men in the 48 least developed nations are online versus 12.5% of women, with a gender gap of 22.3 million or about 30%.

The analysis, released at the Web Summit, forecast the digital gender divide would widen further by 2020 to about 32% when factoring in population growth and current internet trends, to a gap of 53.5 million.

The report said a global target set by UN member states last year to have universal affordable internet access in the least developed countries by 2020 was off track.

Anti-poverty campaigners and tech leaders such as Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg have actively promoted the internet to help lift people out of poverty by connecting them to education and business opportunities as well as health services and banking.

David McNair, policy director at ONE, said the new analysis showed that almost 350 million women and girls would remain unconnected by 2020 compared to about 290 million men due to a range of access, cultural and literacy factors.

"But the fact is that when you empower women and girls to more education and job opportunities then this also benefits their families, communities and countries," Mr McNair told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview in Lisbon.

Studies repeatedly show that women plough 90% of their income back into their families compared to men, who invest about 35% in their families.

While internet connectivity is assumed as a given in many parts of the world, figures show that 53% of the world population - or 3.9 billion people - remains unconnected, according to the International Telecommunication Union.

The ITU, a UN agency for information and communication technologies, estimates almost 75% of people in Africa do not use the internet compared to 21% of Europeans, and usage rates are higher for men than women globally.

A survey of 40 countries by the US-based Pew Research Center earlier this year found Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana were the countries with the largest divide between the numbers of men and women likely to use the internet.

Mr McNair said ONE was encouraging tech leaders among the up to 72,000 attendees at the Web Summit to recognise the importance of internet accessibility and affordability to the world's poorest people and find solutions to address this.

He said governments needed to invest more in technology infrastructure and change laws to open up internet and mobile markets.

The private sector also had a role to play in finding innovative ways to deliver the internet to communities, he said.

"We want tech leaders to use their brilliant minds to find solutions to help those living in poverty and not just people in London and San Francisco," said McNair.

"We need to stop the next generation of women missing the opportunities for empowerment, education and inclusion offered by the internet."