Cellphones are taking over the world
First the telephone box disappeared. Then the public telephone started to look ailing. Now the wired phone is disappearing. Depending on your age you do all your communication on your cell phone. Indeed, for many young people if they lose their cellphone they lose their identity.
It is common practice now for younger people not to have a fixed line in any apartment they rent. They live by their mobile. In many societies not to have a cellphone is, if not an impossibility, an eccentricity.
Over 60 percent of the world’s citizens have a cell phone.
There has been a massive inncrease in recent years and that s largely due to mobile phone adoption in poor and developing countries. As recently as seven years ago, less than 15 percent of the world’s population had cell phones. China alone changed that.
Now we are talking about a four times growth in mobile subscriptions since 2002, when there were about one million mobile subscriptions around the world. Probably, by the end of last year that were 4.1 billion subscriptions.
(The word ‘probably’ because there is a fair amount of fiddling going on and the figure — adding legal to illegal — would probably be higher.
If mobile phones went up 400 percent how fared the Internet?
Probably more than doubled in the same period. Currently, about 23 percent of the population goes online, up from only 11 percent in 2002. However, there is a major change happening in the way the Internet is accessed and as cellphones are used more and more for accessing the Internet so we can expect these figures to change.
The Scandinavian countries have always led the charge when it comes to ownership but South Korea is now second and will have nation-wide Gigabit broadband network by 2012 when it just might get to the top.
Where will the growth in the rest of the world come from?
Oddly the United States is only around 17 on the list and China is 73. In China it is a function of income/cost. As mobile phones become more and more affordable so will that figure change. With new networks being brought into use it is imperative for the Chinese communications companies to find more customers as well as converting current users. There is little doubt they will succeed in this. India, which is currently around 118, also has a lot of room for growth.
For mobile phone usage there is only one direction for the figures to go and that is up.
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