Half the world’s population carries a cell phone

When first launched the cell phone was perhaps the ultimate status symbol, carried by the rich and the faddists. Now more than half the world's population carries one, says a report by a UN telecommunications agency.

According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), by the end of last year there were an estimated 4.1 billion cell phone subscriptions globally. This compares with about 1 billion in 2002, it said.

"There has been a clear shift to mobile cellular telephony," the ITU said. It also said that developing countries now account for about two-thirds of cell phones in use, a massive jump from 2002 when less than half of global mobile subscriptions were in the developing world.

The ITU also said Internet use has more than doubled with an estimated 23 per cent of people on the planet accessing the internet last year, up from 11 per cent in 2002.

However, poor countries still lagged behind on internet access, with only one in 20 people in Africa having access in 2007, the year for which definite figures are available.

The sharpest rise was recorded in mobile broadband subscriptions, the agency said. This high speed web access technology, increasingly equipping mobile devices, was available to 3 per cent of people worldwide, increasing to 14 per cent in developed countries.

As for fixed line telephone subscriptions, ITU said, it increased at a much slower pace to 1.27 billion, from about 1 billion over the same period.

The 106-page report also ranked countries according to their use of information and communications technology (ICT). The country topping the ICT chart was Sweden, closely followed by South Korea. Denmark came third, ahead of the Netherlands, Iceland and Norway.

Doing well were small, densely populated countries, such as Luxembourg (7) and Hong Kong (11) while large developing countries like China (73) and India (118) were pulled down by the size of their populations.

The United States fell from 11th to 17th place overall, despite having some of the cheapest services especially for broadband.

ITU officials said global economic recession would affect development of telecommunications technology around the world.