Mobile Penetration Hits 50% Globally: The lure of big numbers
It was reported yesterday that 50% of the world’s population, 3.3 billion people, now have a mobile phone. Truly its an epic milestone for the mobile industry. With 224 networks across the world, the average country has 15m mobile users. It’s taken 26 years to get to there.
So what is the next big milestone? 4 billion subs? Not very interesting after we’ve already got to 3.3bn. No, the next epic milestone will be 1 billion regular mobile internet users.
For me, that marks the point where the mobile internet breaks out and goes mass market.
In Western markets (US, W. Europe) we’re now seeing about 10% penetration of mobile internet users (MEF report, Feb 2007). I’m defining a mobile internet user as someone who uses the browser on the phone at least once per month to find content. If 10% of the whole world’s 3.3 billion subscribers were using the mobile internet, that would be 330m users. I’d be willing to bet money on 200 million regular mobile internet users today, at the very least.
How far could this go? For a glimpse of the future, consider Japan. ComScore reported a couple of months ago that almost as many Japanese (53.6 million) used a mobile device to access the internet as accessed the internet from a work or home PC (53.7 million). Mobile internet usage in Japan already averages 8.1 hours per month compared to 18.9 hours per month for PCs. That’s 37 minutes per day!
From 200 million today to 1 billion – how long is it going to take? It’s going to happen a lot quicker than getting to the first 1 billion mobile voice users, that’s for sure. Mobile user interfaces are going to have to improve, but the iPhone shows the magnitude of the improvement that’s coming. The mobile networks are going to need a lot more backhaul bandwidth but a large chunk of the infrastructure is already in place.
I’ll stick my neck out and say no longer than three years – the end of 2010.
[Image source: The Hindu]
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December 9th, 2007 at 10:25 pm
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