September 5, 2007
UN agency says world now has four billion phone subscriptions
Largely because of the mobile phone boom in developing countries, telephone service has quadrupled in the past decade to four billion lines worldwide, according to a report Tuesday from the UN telecommunications agency. [via The Canadian Press Agency.
"The International Telecommunications Union counts 1.27 billion fixed lines and 2.68 billion mobile accounts.
The total number of people represented by those figures is unclear because many people, particularly in industrial countries, have both kinds of service.
... 61 per cent of the world's mobile subscribers are in developing countries, the ITU said. China and India, for example, together added almost 200 million mobile subscribers to the global total in the first three months of this year.
The report also said more than one billion people in the world use the Internet."
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