The human race has crossed a line. There is now one cell phone for every two humans on Earth.
From essentially zero, we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cell phones on a planet of roughly 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history.
“We knew this was going to happen a few years ago. And we know how it will end,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and CEO. “It will end with 5 billion out of the 6” with cell phones. A reasonable prediction is 4 billion in the next few years — the current proposal is 4 billion by 2010.
“Eventually there will be more cell phone users than people who read and write,” Schmidt said.
Here are other interesting cell phones statistics:
* Mobile phones get hooked up at a rate of more than 1,000 a minute.
* Cell phones are the first telecommunications technology in history to have more users in the developing world — almost 60 percent — than in the West.
* Cell phone usage in Africa has been growing close to 50 percent annually, faster than any other region. More than 30 African nations have more cell phones than land lines.
