The speed and scale of the world’s love affair with mobile phones was revealed in a UN report on Monday that showed more than half the global population now pay to use one.
The survey, by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an agency of the UN, also found that nearly a quarter of the world’s 6.7 billion people use the Internet.
But it is the breathtaking growth of cellular technology that is doing more to change society, particularly in developing countries where a lack of effective communications infrastructure has traditionally been one of the biggest obstacles to economic growth.
By the end of last year there were an estimated 4.1 billion mobile subscriptions, up from 1 billion in 2002. That represents six in 10 of the world’s population, although it is hard to make a precise calculation about how many people actually use mobile phones.
Africa is the continent with the fastest growth, where penetration has soared from just one in 50 people at the turn of the century to 28 percent.
Much of the take-up is thought to have been driven by money-transfer services that allow people without bank accounts to send money speedily and safely by text messages, which the recipient — typically a family member — can cash in at the other end. Vodafone’s M-Pesa money-transfer service was launched in Kenya in 2007 and now has 5 million users.
The ITU report points to the Gambia, where mobile subscriptions have rocketed amid stiff competition among mobile operators. Out of almost 1 million telephone subscribers, there are more than 800,000 mobile subscriptions but only about 50,000 fixed-telephone lines in service.
Developing countries now account for about two-thirds of the mobile phones in use, compared with less than half of subscriptions in 2002.
The adoption of mobile technology has outstripped the growth of fixed-line connections, which rose from 1 billion to 1.3 billion over the same period, with market penetration stuck just below 20 percent for some years.
The figures demonstrate that many people in the developing world are bypassing the older technology altogether.
In the developed world, many people use more than one mobile device, with subscriptions exceeding population by 11 percent in Europe.
On the other hand, a single mobile phone may have several users in poorer countries, where handsets are sometimes shared or rented out by their owners.
“There has been a clear shift to mobile cellular telephony,” the ITU report said. “In contrast to the growth in the mobile sector, fixed telephony has experienced nearly no growth in the last decade.”
The agency painted a positive picture of a world being opened up and given fresh opportunities by improved communications.
“The spread of mobile cellular services and technologies has made great strides towards connecting the previously unconnected,” it said.
The report also recorded a marked increase in Internet use, which more than doubled from 11 percent of people using the Internet in 2002 to 23 percent last year.
Here the report identified a clear gap between the rich and poor world: Fewer than one in 20 Africans went online in 2007, for instance, and less than 15 percent in Asia, whereas Europe and the Americas recorded penetration of 43 percent and 44 percent respectively.
Across the world just 5 percent of people have broadband Internet at home, although this rises to 20 percent in the developed world.
RSS