Global cellphone penetration reaches new milestone – 60% of globe now mobile
By Will Park on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009 at 2:14 PM PST In Announcements, Research
The world is changing. And, fueled by spectacular growth in the mobile space, the world is changing faster than ever. At the turn of the millennium, around the year 2002, only 15% of the globe was wirelessly connected. A new United Nations report shows just how far we’ve come – a whopping 60% of the world can say they have a cellphone in their pockets. With six out of every ten people on the planet now subscribed to a wireless plan of some sort, it’s safe to say that mobile phones are penetrating every corner of the globe at an almost frightening pace!
In that same span of time, wireline subscriptions only increased from 1 billion connections to 1.27 billion connections. That gives wireless subscriptions a 3:1 advantage over fixed-line subscriptions – an impressive figure, but by no means unexpected. Wireline growth has been losing ground to the wireless movement for some time now, so it’s not all that surprising to see that the overwhelming majority of people on this planet are choosing to use their mobile phones as their main communications line.
The UN report also ranked each country according to how advanced their information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure is:
- Sweden
- South Korea
- Denmark
- Netherlands
- Iceland
- Norway
In case you’re wondering how the US measures up, the UN ranked our Yankee ICT development as No. 17 in the world. What, did you expect the US to rank higher, or something?
[Via: TGDaily]
