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3.3 Billion Mobile Devices = Half the Planet

By Jason Grigsby

Published on December 16th, 2007

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I wrote recently about how the number of mobile devices dwarfs all other media and how this staggering this statistic is. A recent study puts the number of mobile devices at 3.3 billion, up from the previous number of 2.7 billion. That is one mobile device for half of the world’s population.

Tomi T Ahonen provides some context on these new numbers:

  • Growth is accelerating, not slowing down as many predicted
  • 3.3 billion is the number of devices, not the number of people. Many people have more than one phone. Italy has a 140% subscriber rate. The number of people using mobile devices is 2.55 billion which means there is still room to grow.

Much like Tomi’s previous article, the real perspective comes from his comparison of the number of mobile devices (3.3 billion) to things we take for granted. For example. there are only 1.5 billion people in the world who have credit cards.