Monday, March 3, 2008

Mobile Phone Subscriber Update: A Global Wireless World



Wikipedia's December, 2007 worldwide update on mobile phone subscriptions, dominant and developing wireless countries, manufacturer penetration and other data is astonishing. The references and documentation are first rate. Anyone interested in mobile telephony on the globe should read this lengthy article.
For most readers who won't read the entire Wikipedia article, I've listed below some of the highlights with links for further follow-up. (All lines are quotes from the article.)


  • An increasing number of countries, particularly in Europe, now have more mobile phones than people.
  • Luxembourg had the highest mobile phone penetration rate at 158 mobile subscriptions per 100 people (158%), closely followed by Lithuania and Italy. [6] In Hong Kong the penetration rate reached 139.8% of the population in July 2007.[7]
  • The U.S. currently has [a] mobile phone penetration rate of 81%.
  • There are over five hundred million active mobile phone accounts in China, as of 2007, but the total penetration rate there still stands below 50%.[8]
  • The total number of mobile phone subscribers in the world was estimated at 2.14 billion in 2005.[9] The subscriber count reached 2.7 billion by end of 2006 according to Informa[citation needed], and 3.3 billion by November, 2007[10], thus reaching an equivalent of over half the planet's population. Around 80% of the world's population enjoys mobile phone coverage as of 2006. This figure is expected to increase to 90% by the year 2010.[11]
  • Africa has the largest growth rate of cellular subscribers in the world,[12] its markets expanding nearly twice as fast as Asian markets.[13]
  • India is the largest growth market, adding about 6 million mobile phones every month.[14] With 256.55 million mobile phones, market penetration in the country is still low at 22.52%. India expects to reach 500 million subscribers by end of 2010.
  • In less than twenty years, the mobile phone has gone from being rare, expensive equipment of the business elite to a pervasive, low-cost personal item. In many countries, mobile phones outnumber land-line phones; in the U.S., 50 percent of children have mobile phones.[15] In many young adults' households it has supplanted the land-line phone.
  • The mobile phone is banned in some countries, such as North Korea.[16]
  • The SMS feature spawned the "texting" sub-culture.[citation needed] In December 1993, the first person-to-person SMS text message was transmitted in Finland. Currently, texting is the most widely-used data service; 1.8 billion users generated $80 billion of revenue in 2006 (source ITU).
  • The mobile phone can be a fashion totem custom-decorated to reflect the owner's personality.[17] This aspect of the mobile telephony business is, in itself, an industry, e.g. ringtone sales amounted to $3.5 billion in 2005.[18]
The data speaks for itself. We are--globally--going wireless and there's no end in sight.

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