1 mobile account for every 2 earthlings

摘要

Somewhere on the planet last Thursday someone skipped over pages of fine print they will later regret not reading, to sign a mobile services contract that brought the worldwide number of such accounts to 3.3 billion, a figure roughly equal to half the Earth's population. We don't know who it was, but can't you just see the balloons and confetti falling on some startled AT&T customer in Ottumwa, Iowa? Announcing this milestone with such remarkable precision were the industry analysts at Informa Telecoms and Media, who in their press release also provided a treasure trove of interesting facts and trivia regarding the mobile-phone revolution: 1 In 1987,35 countries hosted mobile-phone networks, a figure that had risen to 192 a decade later and today stands at 224.