Ericsson: One cellular subscription for every person on earth by 2013
A pitch from Ericsson, to promote its greening initiatives, opens with an interesting prognosis:
By 2013, Ericsson ... anticipates that there will be some 6.5 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world, compared to today’s 3.7 billion. About 90 percent of growth is expected to come from developing markets where more than half of the population lives outside city limits.
This is an interesting follow-up to today's earlier news that North Korea, of all places, is establishing a 3G cellular service. The temptation is to think that it's just a toy for the bureaucracy, but it's perhaps the nation's only hope to maintain a working infrastructure. Cellphone networks aren't reliant on miles of rotting (or nonexistent) cabling, after all.
Ericsson's prediction isn't that everyone will have a cellphone, but it's got to be close—even gadget bloggers don't need many! Does this imply that not owning a cellphone will soon be a matter of personal choice, even for the world's poorest?
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The lion's share of those subscriptions will be GSM/GPRS. I'd say around two orders of magnitude greater than 3G subscriptions, globally.
I don't recall the exact time frame, but during a couple of months last year the number of GSM subscriptions increased with the same amount as the total accumulated number of 3G subscriptions purchased since 3G was introduced.
Many countries just developing phone service are jumping directly to cellular. As you observed, it is TREMENDOUSLY cheaper than running new copper to every telephone.
Add the fact that this is becoming the cheapest way for remote monitoring equipment to report back, and that people are still interested in the phone-as-debit-card idea; those may mean a lot of subscriptions for non-humans.
According to several sources the would population will be at 7 billion then. That would still be an impressive 93% though.