Submitted by Mike Grenville on Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:08

The number of mobile phone users worldwide will exceed 4 billion mark by the end of this year - two thirds of the population of the world. Time for a wake up call.

According to the European Information Technology Observatory (EITO), the number of mobile phone users will rise from 3.9 billion in 2008 to 4.4 billion in 2009, an increase of 12 percent.

Continued Growth Areas

“The strongest growth in the use of mobile phones now comes from newly industrialized and developing countries”, says EITO chairman Bruno Lamborghini. The number of mobile phone users in India is expected to increase by 32 percent in the year 2009 to 457 million. In Brazil, the number of mobile phone users will rise by 14 percent to 172 million and in China by 12 percent to 684 million.

In industrialized countries, growth rates are considerably smaller. This is due to the fact that levels of mobile phone use are already high. In the European Union, EITO predicts that the number of mobile phone accounts will increase by 4 percent to 641 million in 2009. Thus, in the EU, there are considerably more mobile contracts than inhabitants. “In Europe, the USA and Japan, the trend is for high-quality multimedia mobiles with Internet access”, says Lamborghini. The number of UMTS accounts in the EU will increase by 36 percent to around 172 million in 2009, while the number of conventional accounts on the basis of so-called GSM technology will decrease by 5 percent to 469 million.

Data Services Growth

Turnover in the area of mobile data services is also growing strongly in the EU and will increase by 10 percent to around € 33 billion in 2009. In the UK, the number of UMTS accounts will increase by 40 percent to around 33 million according to EITO estimates. Thus two thirds of the around 81 million mobile phone accounts in the UK are UMTS-capable. In Italy the total number of mobile phone accounts will increase in 2009 by 2 percent to around 93 million, 31 million will be UMTS-capable (plus 26 percent).

A similar picture emerges in the USA. It is estimated that the number of UMTS users there will increase by 74 percent to 108 million this year. The number of conventional GSM accounts will decrease by 7 percent to 177 million. The Japanese are the forerunners when it comes to mobile data use. In Japan, 90 percent of all mobile phones are already connected to fast third-generation data networks.

Waiting For The Wake Up Call

The full implications of two-thirds of the world population using a mobile phone have hardly been understood. In a way that has never hapened before in the history of humanity, we are truly becoming connected. This inter-connection is right down to the individual level and puts the power literally in each of our hands, not withstanding the attempts by some governments to filter and restrict information flow.

While the physical resources of the plant are becoming more and more under pressure, the thing that is not running out is human creativity.

Although we are heading for imminent planetary overshoot as we consume and exceed the carrying capacity of the planet, when the real wake up call comes, the deep and wide reach of mobile communications around the word now stands ready to bring about a great turning everywhere together.