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UN: worldwide internet users hit two billion, cellphone subscriptions top five billion |
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Tuesday, 23 November 2010 |
The UN's International Telecommunication Union predicted last fall that the variety of internet customers worldwide would hit two billion by the top of 2010, and it's now issued its full report that confirms just that -- 2.08 billion, to be specific. As the ITU's Hamadoun Toure notes, that quantity represents an enormous leap from the mere 250 million internet customers that existed a decade ago, and it means that roughly one third of the world's population now has internet access of some kind -- of those, 555 million have a hard and fast broadband subscription, and 950 million have mobile broadband.
Just as spectacular as that (if not moreso), are the number of cellphone subscriptions worldwide, which has now crossed the five billion mark. That is up from 500 million originally of the 12 months 2000, though the company notes that it's only accounted for "subscriptions," and never individual users. Any method you slice it, nevertheless, that is fairly a document of development for the first decade of the twenty first century.
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