Thursday, December 9, 2004
Mobile phone users double since 2000: ITU
Reuters Geneva, December 9
Mobile phone subscribers around the globe totalled nearly 1.5 billion by the middle of this year, about one quarter of the world's population, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said on Thursday.
The figure reflected a sharp surge in the mobile telephony business, especially in developing countries, over the first half of the decade, with subscribers doubling since 2000, according to the United Nations agency's annual report.
The ITU said the growth in mobile phone subscribers had outpaced that for fixed lines, who totalled some 1.85 billion today against one billion at the start of the century, and was also outstripping the rate of increase in Internet users.
Driving the mobile phone phenomenon, according to the report, was a rapid rise in subscriber numbers in three of the world's most populous nations -- China, India and Russia.
And by the middle of the year developing countries as a whole had overtaken rich nations to account for 56 per cent of all mobile subscribers, while accounting for 79 per cent of growth in the market since 2000.
By July this year, China was reporting 310 million users -- about one-quarter of its total population and more than the entire population of the United States, the ITU said.
India, with a much smaller current subscriber base, was beginning to experience exponential growth, seeing an increase of 11 million, or 25 per cent, so far this year to reach a total of 44.5 million subscribers.
In Russia, according to the report, mobile phone subscriber numbers jumped from 36.5 million a year ago to 60 million by September of this year.
The value of global mobile business reached $414 billion in revenues in 2003, a tenfold increase in the decade since 1993, while over the same period the overall telecommunications sector grew by an average of 8.8 per cent to reach $1.1 trillion.
In the fixed-line sector, the mainstay of public telecommunications since the late 19th century, growth had been sluggish and had even declined since 2001 -- partly because of declining revenues for international telephone traffic.
This was largely due to increased routing of calls though computer networks and to cut-price competition as global trade rules managed by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) brought new low-cost service providers into the market.
By the end of this year, the report said, global revenues from mobile networks were likely to exceed those from fixed-line networks for the first time.
The ITU said the number of Internet users -- around 400 million in the year 2000 -- had grown to nearly 700 million by the middle of this year, slowing down after the rapid surge in the second half of the 1990s.
But the Internet subscriber rate could be boosted if high-speed access to mobile phones or portable computers through wireless technology was made more widely available in developing countries where fixed lines were scarce, the ITU said.
© HT Media Ltd. 2004.