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Over 2.5 Billion Cellular Connections Now Active
An anonymous reader writes "It appears that humankind has managed to spread cellular technology like a virus. About 2.5 billion cellular connections exist in the world today, according to an estimate from the GSM Association.
It took 20 years to reach 1 billion connections, three years to reach 2 billion connections and the market is moving to reach its third billion in a period of just over two years.
Not surprisingly, the countries with fastest growth are the 'emerging nations.'"
You can't compare the US cellular market to anything else. It is a quagmire. Compare India (with it's administrative circles, weird government regulations and crappy operators) with something in Europe instead. In fact, India is so far behind on the scale it isn't even funny.
I've had a wonderful time, but this wasn't it -- Groucho Marx
How can this be if there aren't enough digits in a US phone number
Because it's a US phone number, and the article is about other, forrin countries as well.
(MS)ISDN E.164 numbers are 15 digits, including the country code. Even the North American Numbering Plan can be expanded vastly, from 11 digits (the one counts!) to 15; a factor 10,000.
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No. That's because India has the 2nd largest population. It's beeten by China.
A better measure is per capita deployment where some European countries have passed 100% (more people with 2 or more cellphones than people with none at all).
Or even small "Developing" countries like Jamaica with Over 2 Million Cellphones and a population of 2.7 Million.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
But it's not that surprising really. I've alwasy understood that the economics of the mobile network (feel free to shoot me down here since I'm relaying and might have got this wrong) are essentially controlled by population density. There is a point beyond which it becomes uneconomic to develop a digital cell network due to the limited range of the transmitters (about 11 miles nominal range the last time I looked).
So it's not really surprising that the largest developments are in the developing countries and specifically Asia. There are large VERY densely populated urban centres which, until recently, had no cell coverage. So even selling call time at a low rate will mean that companies can recover their investment very quickly. So I would guess that the graph in the article will have to flatten out, or the emphasis will shift to different markets as the large urban areas in Asia and South America become saturated with providers in the same way as European cities are.
In Europe after the inital rapid development of the urban networks the coverage of rural areas was very slow. Scotland was a prefect example. Over half the population of the country lives in a 50 mile strip along the central belt of the country. Fine. Great coverage. Go up to the highlands....and until recently it was a very different story. The landscape and low population density made it a costly investment to cover these areas. You would have to expect that the same thing will happen in these new markets. Explosive development in e.g Mumbai followed by a much, much slower growth over the country as a whole. I'd love to see a distribution map of this stuff.
Anyway back to the original point. I've always understood that the reason why the service in the U.S. was rubbish was that, once the urban areas were well covered there was no real impetus to extend that to the gulfs between cities.
Hmmmmmm
Business and pleasure.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
I never quite worked this one out myself, I think it has just been accepted without really questioning why. It is another reason why most of us (in the UK) have mobiles and text each other (although a simple text message can often turn into a big text conversation and end up being more expensive than just calling the person in the first place)
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Intel was able to invest 5M and offer coverage to the Gulf Coast. BellSouth will invest $700M (or $1B) and get coverage, offering a total bandwidth maybe 2 000 times more than Intel could offer with their $5M. It's all in what you want - if what you want is minimal access, those $5M goes a long way - if you want something more bandwidth intensive, you're out of luck
Connections means "calls", not "phones".
I've heard this argument about it costing more in the US frequently, but in my experience it's a misrepresentation. I've compared them from time to time with UK tariffs, which may be artificially high, I'm not sure, and US cellphone tariffs are extremely attractive.
The major difference is that on the low end, you can just about get away with a slightly better plan in Europe than in the US, but - get this - it's only useful and cheap if you're not a cellphone user. Essentially, pay as you go in Europe generally has lower minimums that last longer. So whereas in the US, you may have to pay $10 a month to keep your account open (though T-Mobile will keep an account open for a year for every top-up once you've paid at least $100 once), in Europe that may be what you have to pay for an entire year's worth of being connected. Europeans tend to forget though that one reason for that is that mobile operators can depend upon a significant number of PAYG users having their bills paid for by others in the form of incoming calls, which are charged at high rates to the originator of the call.
So if you don't use your phone that often - maybe a hundred minutes or less a year - or get a lot of incoming calls, you, personally, don't have to pay much. Overall though, in the latter case, the bills for owning your mobile will be high, it's just they're paid for by other people.
My wife and I are on a US tariff that gives us the following (and it's not even that great by modern US standards:
For that we're paying around $90 a month, inclusive of taxes, that amounts to (if I have the calculations correct) 25GBP per phone per month. Now, typically, we make (well) over 2,000 minutes of calls per month (it varies, we've had bills showing more than 4,000 minutes in the past, back when we were planning the wedding), and between the unmetered call types and the 700 minute call allowance, we're always well within our limits (we've never had to pay overage since we got the plan.) The only time we pay more than the $90 fee is when we make outgoing international calls or outgoing international text messages.
If we were living alone, we could get similar plans for around $50 a month, with plans with slightly less features available for less. Some operators, notably MetroPCS, offer completely unmetered, no contract, plans for well under $50.
I looked, and I'm loath to see anything comparable in the UK. The best I can find are some temporary offers from Orange that offer unlimited calls between Orange cellphones, or (on a seperate plan!) to landlines (one of these is limited to off-peak, I can't remember which), and an offer from Vodafone to "stop the clock" making off-peak calls limited to one hour cost "three minutes" of airtime.
For that reason, people don't really use mobile phones to talk in the UK that often. Texting is the "big thing". This isn't something many have noticed because until recently landlines were also only available with metered calls, even local calls, so people are used to watching what they say and how long they speak for on phones.
The thing most people who make the comparison fail to do is ask "Which place has the better plans if I want to use my phone?" As a general rule, the more you use it, the better the US plans are and the worse the "We must meter everything!" attitude the European telecommuni
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.