There Will Soon Be More Mobile Phones Than There Are People in the World
Capital of Nasty, an Electronic Magazine - ISSN 1482-0471
Saturday, July 21, 2012 at 21:00 (7072/48)
According to a report by the World Bank, three-quarters of the world population now has access to a mobile phone. At the rate this is going, it is predicted that by 2015, there will be more phones than there are human beings.
From the article in The Atlantic:
Even at the height of landline subscriptions there were "only" about one billion globally, and it took more than a century to get there. Of course, mobile and landlines require different infrastructure and most people did not have an individual landline but rather a household one. But even taking those differences into account, the spread of mobile is representative of a globalized economy in which new technologies can spread farther and faster than ever before.
Also, in contrast with landlines, mobile tech is not only a telephone but a broader multimedia device (just how broad depends on the phone). In particular, consider text messaging. Nearly five trillion (that's trillion, with a "tr") text messages were sent in 2010, more than 12 million per day. Mobile Internet use lags behind but is growing as more capable smartphones become cheaper and more widely available.
Please enter your comment below. Hit Return twice (leaving a completely blank line) between paragraphs.
Use [b] for bold [/b] and [i] for italic [/i]. All other HTML commands will be stripped.
Your comment is (almost) immediately placed online as soon as you hit 'Post'.
Specifying an email address is optional. In the interests of your own privacy, CoN discourages you from doing so. Further, think twice about revealing any other personal information including telephone number, real name, exact address or blood type.