- guardian.co.uk, Friday September 26 2008 09.32 BST
Japanese commuters while away the journey by watching TV on their mobiles. Photograph: David Sacks/Getty
The world's love affair with the mobile phone shows no sign of abating, with the head of the UN's agency for information and communication technologies predicting that there will be 4 billion mobile phone users - or more than half of the planet's estimated 6.7 billion inhabitants - by the end of this year.
Hamadoun Touré, secretary general of the International Telecom Union, said growth has been driven by consumer take-up in developing markets such as China, India and Latin America.
Speaking at the UN's session on the Millennium Development Goals in New York, he added: "The fact that 4 billion subscribers have been registered worldwide indicates that it is technically feasible to connect the world to the benefits of information communications technology."
The mobile phone industry has boomed over the past eight years, recording average year-on-year subscriber growth of 24%. At the start of the century, just 12% of the world's population had a mobile phone. Now that figure is well over 50% and is estimated to reach about 61% by the end of 2008.
The reduction in cost of mobile phone handsets and the fact that in many developing countries the fixed line infrastructure is patchy at best has made mobile communications extremely attractive to consumers in developing countries and markets. The so-called BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India and China are expected to account for over 1.3 billion mobile subscribers by the end of this year.
At the same time, the more developed markets such as western Europe have reached saturation point, with competition and regulation reducing prices. As a result, many of the major western players are looking to the developing world for their next stage of growth.
The ITU said the figures count subscribers so would include some double counting of consumers who have more than one mobile phone - as is often the case in countries such as Italy, where people have different numbers for work and personal use. But the actual number number of mobile phone users may be higher, as some subscribers, particularly in developing countries, share their mobile phone with others.
Joss Gillet, senior analyst at Wireless Intelligence - the mobile market data service from GSM Media which is part of industry body the GSM Association - said about 600m new mobile phone connections will be added this year.
Africa and the Middle East are the two fastest-growing regions with yearly growth expected to reach, respectively, 27% and 25%, followed by Asia-Pacific on 23.6%. Operators in India, Bangladesh, Iran, Ivory Coast, Uganda and Afghanistan have recorded the fastest growth so far this year.
Of those connections, mobile phones using the GSM standard - as found in the UK and across Europe - are expected to account for 80% of the total connections by the end of this year. The CDMA family of technologies found in China and the USA will have just over 10%, with the rest using new high-speed 3G networks.
Gillet said the industry should be able to weather the current economic turmoil. In Europe, mobile revenues grew faster than GDP last year and "in 2008, we expect to see a similar relatively healthy growth in mobile revenues for operators in western Europe where competition is getting tougher.
"Operators in mature markets are now focusing on revenue stimulation and fighting churn through key competitive factors such as: price elasticity, network coverage, loyalty policy, quality of services, value added services and market segmentation."
