2011 ends with almost 6bn mobile phone subscriptions

The number of mobile phone subscriptions has reached 5.9 billion, an impressive figure in a world of 7 billion people.

Surveying the mobile and online landscape in 2011 for a year-end report (PDF), the International Telecommunications Union found that mobile phone subscriptions have now penetrated 87 per cent of the entire world and 79 per cent of all developing countries.

Among all those mobile phone users, mobile broadband subscriptions number almost 1.2 billion. Such subscriptions have jumped 45 per cent each year for the past four years and now outnumber fixed broadband subscriptions by two to one.

To push forward with mobile broadband, 159 nations across the world have kicked off 3G networks, though 2G coverage is still twice as high as 3G. Overall, people in developed countries typically use both mobile and fixed broadband, while those in less developed economies often have access only to mobile broadband services.

Switching over to fixed broadband, one-third of the 1.8 billion household around the world now have internet access, up from one-fifth just five years ago. In developing nations, 25 per cent of all homes have a PC and 20 per cent have internet access.

Among all the major nations, Korea still offers the fastest broadband access with almost the whole country enjoying speeds of more than 10 megabits per second. Further down the list, the US is more of a mixed bag with a little more than one third of the population seeing speeds higher than 10Mbps and the rest stuck between 2 to 10Mbps and 256Kbps to 2Mbps.

Overall, a full one-third of the 7 billion people on the planet use the internet, and 45 per cent of them are under the age of 25. Internet use has been growing in developing countries, accounting for 62 per cent of the world's total last year, compared with just 44 per cent in 2006. China alone represents almost 25 per cent of the world's total.

Still, developing nations have a ways to go. Across the different age groups in the developing world, 30 per cent of people under 25 use the internet, compared with 23 per cent of those 25 and older. But that 70 per cent of the under-25 crowd not online adds up to 1.9 billion people, an open door for schools to provide access and potentially boost enrolment, says the ITU.

Via CNET