The European Commission’s statistics group, Eurostat, has revealed that there is almost one mobile phone subscription for every citizen in the EU, and that in many countries, people are abandoning their fixed line entirely in favour of the mobile.
The Eurostat study reveals that nearly a fifth of households in the 25 European nations had a mobile phone but no fixed line in 2006. Lithuania tops the list where 48% of households have a mobile but no longer have a fixed line. It is closely followed by Finland (47%), Czech Republic (42%) and Latvia (40%). Fixed mobile substitution is least common in Sweden, Malta, Netherlands and Luxembourg where it is less than 10%.
Mobile continues to boom in developing markets too. Informa Telecoms & Media reports that there are now 3.3 billion mobile subscriptions, equivalent to half of the world’s population.
“The mobile industry has constantly outperformed even the most optimistic forecasts for subscriber growth,” said Mark Newman, chief research officer at Informa Telecoms & Media. “It is difficult to imagine how a modern economy could function without mobile telephony and a number of recent studies have shown that the mobile phone is having a hugely positive impact on the economies of emerging markets.”Informa estimates that mobile networks covered 90% of the global population by mid-2007. If prices continue to fall, it may not be too long before the next 1 billion join the age of the mobile phone.