News: Five billion mark surpassed in mobile subscriptions

Based on industry information the five billionth mobile subscription mark was crossed last Thursday (8 July 2010). This is according to telecoms technology and service provider Ericsson.

This milestone was achieved largely due to growth in Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, which together accounted for 80% of global subscription net additions during the first half of 2010. There are 450 million mobile subscriptions in Africa now, compared to about 16 million subscriptions in 2000.

Mobile broadband subscriptions are expanding at the same blistering pace and are expected to amount to over 3.4 billion by 2015, which will be up from 360 million in 2009, with over 100 million of these emanating from sub-Saharan Africa.

Studies also indicate that soon 80% of all people accessing the internet will be doing so from their mobile device, which is already the case on the African continent.

“The use of mobile broadband is growing quickly, especially driven by consumers powered with smart phones and connected laptops and we at Ericsson envision 50 billion connected devices by 2020,” said Lars Lindén, head of Ericsson Region sub-Saharan Africa.

Local Internet connectivity via broadband connections has also grown by more than 50% in the past year, according to the Internet Access in South Africa 2010 study conducted by World Wide Worx in collaboration with Cisco.

Five billion mark surpassed in mobile subscriptions

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