Does Almost Everyone have a Phone?

It is estimated that by the end of 2013, there will be nearly as many mobile subscriptions worldwide as there are people on Earth, with more than half of these subscriptions in the Asia-Pacific region. If this trend continues, it is predicted that mobile subscriptions could reach 7 billion in 2014. According to GSMA’s report The Mobile Economy, released in February 2013, the actual number of individual mobile subscribers will reach 3.4 billion during this year. There are several factors to explain the huge difference between the number of subscriptions and the number of individual subscribers.

Most analysts agree that one main reason for this difference is that many individuals have more than one subscription, for example, a business and a personal subscription, whilst others have none. So double counting takes place when these individual consumers subscribe to more than one service. In many developing countries, where the large majority of subscriptions are on a prepaid basis, people often buy several SIM cards to avoid paying high-termination charges which occur when calling from one network to another. Further to this, there is research to suggest that in developing countries many individuals may share one subscription, for example, through a village phone, or as a family. Another factor is that, in some cases, operators are slow to remove inactive accounts from their databases and therefore end up reporting inactive SIM cards in their subscription totals.