CHART OF THE DAY: More People Have Mobile Phones Than Electricity Or Drinking Water en-us Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 -0500 Sat, 27 Dec 2014 01:37:09 -0500 Jay Yarow John Currie Fri, 04 May 2012 09:54:10 -0400 I get what you are trying to say with your headline. The idea is to try and visualise just how large that market really is. Most figures do in any event indicate a figure of over. 5 billion which is mind boggling! andrewDC Tue, 01 May 2012 07:10:36 -0400 You don't have to have electricity to have mobile phones.... All over West Africa I've been to villages where there is no electricity but there is mobile phone service. People use solar panels and car batteries to recharge phones (often, a corner store will have the charging service set up, and others will just use it; even in towns with electricity, everyone may not be hooked up to the grid, but they go charge their phone at the corner store (and pay a small amount to do so). The cell phone towers themselves usually work off of a combination of solar, batteries, and generators. But I do agree with you about the wording... does appear to be subscriptions... of which one person could have multiple subscriptions (also in West Africa, I used to walk around with two different sim cards for two different phone companies... two different "subscriptions," if you will). fuzzy_nugget Tue, 01 May 2012 05:57:06 -0400 I am not that technical, nor am I a statistician -- but this strikes me as meaningless without disclosure of the assumptions or methodologies used to form these figures. Also, a legend or some definitions would be helpful. For example -- and maybe I am missing something here -- what is a "mobile BB user" and a "fixed BB user"? GogogoStopSTOP Tue, 01 May 2012 05:08:24 -0400 Yeah, your right... you plug your charger into the "safe" drinking water. ROTFLMAO! GogogoStopSTOP Tue, 01 May 2012 05:05:38 -0400 It's subscriptions, not phones. You can tell because if it were phones there would be no place to recharge the batteries! LOL Since when did you expect ANY WRITER OR EDITOR to tell the truth. Selling papers is like selling circus tickets... You march through town & leave POOP EVERYWHERE! They think it draws a crowd! ROTFLMAO! Nachko Tue, 01 May 2012 05:04:50 -0400 Sorry...I mean NOT able or ready. Nachko Tue, 01 May 2012 05:04:05 -0400 I see here people who are either able or ready to face the truth. I see here civilization going to collapse. mshoebri Mon, 30 Apr 2012 21:51:36 -0400 It is easy to skip the headline and know that subscriptions does not equal handsets or people.! In the developing world which is where the bulk of the subscriptions are sold. Many handsets are actually sold with "dual SIMs" depending on the deal of the month. Some may use this as data some may use this as SMS/MMS. In any case churn is a massive issues for the operators in the developing world. In a mostly pre-pay environment many will move to where the best deal is. Here are some comments and links to Tomi Ahonen's (A respected mobile commentator) latest blog that discusses mobile stats "Forecast that this year 2012 will end with 5.4 Billion handsets in use worldwide (up from 4.8 Billion in use at the start of the year" "Most of those handsets are still obviously 'dumbphones' but even then, most of those are cameraphones with color screens, full HTML capable web browsers, are Java capable and support all our standard industry tech like SMS and MMS." <a href="" target="_blank"></a> Jamie Turner Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:41:33 -0400 Thanks for the post, Jay. Interesting stuff. We did similar research at the 60 Second Marketer to confirm the urban legend that there are more mobile phone users than toothbrush users. Amazingly, it turned out to be true. You can see the research we conducted here: <a href="" target="_blank"></a> Thanks! -- Jamie Turner Jeremy Kruse Mon, 30 Apr 2012 17:23:44 -0400 Right on Gary. You laid it out perfectly. Who comes up with these numbers? Didn't the intern that put this together stop to ask how more people can have mobile phone subscriptions that have electricity?? How do they charge their phones? Dumb. Gary Overton Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:56:59 -0400 This is very deceiving. Not everyone is counted as having electricity and safe drinking water because 1 house having electricity or safe drinking water could have any number of mobile phone subscriptions. A lot of people also do not pay directly for their water or electricity but they do have it. Also, a lot of kids have mobile phones but have absolutely no use for a bank account, Skeptical Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:54:48 -0400 Is this the population of mobile devices (which I suspect) or the population of people that have mobile devices? It implies that pretty much every human on the planet, no matter how poor, has a mobile device. That seems like a stretch. What's the difference between the red line and blue bars? Also, how does 7 billion become 90% penetration when 7 billion represents 100% of the people on the planet? (The original link cites 7 billion mobile subscriptions, so there is the answer.) Will Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:53:38 -0400 Jay, Your missleading headlines are driving me crazy! READ the chart! Your subject line says more people have mobile phones than Electricity or drinking water. But the chart is a mobile SUBSCRIPTIONS. Will