Andre Yoskowitz
3 Mar 2009 0:07
According to a new United Nations (UN) report, about 60 percent of the world's citizens now own a mobile phone The report states the large jump up is attributable to the strong growth in poor, developing countries, most notably China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
In 2002, only 14 percent of the world's population had any type of mobile phone.
According to the International Telecommunication Union, an agency of the UN, there were 4.1 billion cell phone subscriptions as of the end of 2008, compared with just over 1 billion in 2002.
The report also added figures for Internet usage, noting that about 23 percent of the global population uses the Internet, up from over 12 percent from 2002.
Finally, the report ranked the world's nations on how "advanced their use of information and communications technology (ICT) is" and found Sweden to be the best. Sweden even had more cellular accounts than it had population in 2007. The United States fell to 17th.