World mobile phone subscriptions double landlines

You should see our news feeds sometime. Okay, so they’re not really that interesting, but they do help illustrate this point. You see, while most of the news comes from American outlets, you’d be surprised at the number of news items we see about cell phones in India, Senegal, Pakistan, China, and other Eastern nations that we don’t normally associate with technology. Hell, we also get feeds from Africa. And that’s not to mention the glut of news we see from Europe — the UK and the Netherlands most frequently. Mobile phones are spreading everywhere, leading to an enormous number of worldwide subscribers: 2.68 billion.

The craziest part is that mobile phones have left landlines in the dust. Only (and we say “only” in relative terms) 1.27 such lines exist in the world. It seems illogical at first glance, right? Landlines have been around longer — far longer — than cell phones. Have cell phones really come to replace the landline at such a torrid rate?

Not really. Many of the Eastern countries we mentioned never had a real phone network. Hence, they didn’t have residential landlines in the first place. Building a network of cell towers might be more costly because of the technology, but it’s certainly less of a hassle, as physical wire doesn’t have to be run all across the country.

The world’s two most populated countries, China and India, have been at the forefront of this movement. In the first three months of this year alone, they added a combined 200 million to the world mobile phone count.

We lied in the second paragraph, by the way; there is an even crazier part to this. Just 11 years ago, there were fewer than one billion phone subscriptions, landline and mobile combined. Of course, back then mobile phones were more Zack Morris and less Derek Zoolander.

This number is clearly on the rise, too. With Africa developing at a greater rate, and kids getting cell phones at younger and younger ages, we can see the world phone subscription mark hitting 5 billion in the not so distant future. But we’re not analysts, so don’t ask us when.

[Canadian Press]

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