Emerging markets drive mobile subscriptions over the five billion mark

Last week marked yet another milestone in communications when the five billionth mobile subscription was added to the count, thanks largely to emerging markets like China, India, Nigeria and Zimbabwe.

New data released by Ericsson this week reveals that the main drivers of growth continue to be Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, which together accounted for 80 percent of global subscription net additions in the first half of 2010. Today there are 450 million mobile subscriptions in Africa as compared to the year 2000, when there were about 16 million subscriptions, less than the amount of users in Ghana today.

Mobile broadband subscriptions are growing at a similar pace and are expected to amount to more than 3.4 billion by 2015 (up from 360 million in 2009). Over 100 million of these will come from sub-Saharan Africa, where 80% of all people accessing the internet do so using their mobile device.

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