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.'"

Comments

Re:Some more facts:

[cannonfodda]

I have had a pretty much similar experience with the U.S. network providers. Certainly in Europe the coverage is significantly better and the total cost of ownership of a phone seems a lot less than people are paying in the U.S.

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.