Two billion mobile phone mark reached

THE TOTAL number of mobile phone connexions globally has gone past 2 billion over this weekend, according to Wireless Intelligence. It took 20 years to reach the first billion but a mere three years to add the second billion.

Curiously world No: 1 vendor, Nokia, reckons it will take five years to put on the next billion. After all with an estimated 6.5 billion people in the world, we're running out of people to flog new phones to.

Significantly, Wireless Intelligence is a joint effort between researchers, Ovum, and the GSM Association. So it's no co-incidence that there's a ticker on the GSM Association's web site that shows there's already 1.5 billion GSM subscribers. Which gives GSM and W-CDMA 78 per cent of the world market.

As several markets have achieved greater than 100 per cent market penetration (because loads of Flash Harrys have more than one phone), handset vendors and network operators are having a tough time selling more phones. Which is why they keep putting new features like cameras and MP3 players inside mobile phones.

So "the bulk of the new growth now is coming from large, less well-developed markets such as China, India, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Africa," says Wireless Intelligence.

How is CDMA2000 faring by comparison? Well its got about 280 million subscribers worldwide but then it has only taken eight years to acquire them. Still The INQ calculates it has only about 14 per cent of the world's subscribers. The remaining 8 per cent going to the likes of PDC in Japan and TDMA hold-outs. µ