I’ve heard that six billion people (in other words, pretty much everyone) use a mobile phone but I’m sort of skeptical the number is that high. My guess would be more like 4 or 5 billion. The 6 billion number apparently comes from the number of mobile subs at the end of 2011 but I imagine this number is probably inflated due to many people having multiple subscriptions.
Still I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s actually true more people have a cell phone than a toilet. :D:(
For Internet stats, I’ve heard anything from 30% to 70% of the world’s population uses the Net. I wonder why this figure is more vague - perhaps the lower estimates reflect home connections and the higher estimates reflect the number of people who have used the Net at least once in their life?
There are whole regions in the world where landlines were/are pretty much impossible to set up and maintain, but where cellphone networks work much better. A cellphone network needs a relatively-small amount of repeaters (in many areas, setting up the original cellphone network consisted simply of attaching new disks to existing radio/TV towers), it doesn’t involve kilometers and kilometers of cable which is expensive to set up and maintain and which gets stolen.
Depending on how you define “the net”, you use it any time you use an ATM or pay by card: that’s not “the web” but it’s “the net”. If you have a cellphone, any app you’ve used, the GPS… counts as “using the net”. Those small-scale fishermen with canoes using their GPS to find out exactly where they are, and an app to contact their potential clients and sell the catch before they even return to shore are using the net.
The electronics crisis of the latest 1990s, when there simply weren’t enough electronic components to go around, was caused in part by an unexpectedly high demand from underdeveloped countries. One of the types of loans more often granted by Grameen Bank and similar institutions is to buy cellphones. Grameen also offers apps that help farmers, healthcare workers and others in their daily work: they wouldn’t do it that way if it wasn’t something that’s actually more productive than any non-cellphone-based tools. See here.
I think I can point out the time when mobile became ubiquitous. Literally at the turn of the millenium. In one 2002 college (US dopers, think 12th grade with US college level courses) we studied a collection of short stories published in 1998 and in it having a mobile was shown as something ostentatious, for the rich. In 2002, mobiles were everywhere, all students had them, though we could not bring them to school as did the guys who came to clean.
So yes, phone penetration is so high, that you can more or less assume that anyone you meet will have one.
Internet is more tricky. It depends on what you mean by access. If you restrict it to home use, then you will get a lower figure, but that is misleading because in developing countries, Internet Cafes are everywhere, so a person might have easy access to the web, sans a home connection. The advent if smart phones and internet packages have made even this a difficult statistic to get.
I live in Panama. Almost everyone has a cell phone, including Indians living way up river in the Darien and campesinos living in villages past the end of the last dirt road in the boondocks.
I don’t know how they calculated it, but 3.03 billion unique internet users in summer of 2014.
My mom has never used the internet. My dad has had the internet in the home for 20 years but she has never used it. Well, she does use netflix but she has never been online to use a search engine. In wealthy countries internet penetration seems to max out at 70-90%, I assume most of the rest just don’t want it. Seeing how the internet is free at any library, fast food restaurant and many public spaces now.
According to this 2/3 of African households in a couple dozen nations surveyed had a cell phone.
That is far higher than the 26.5% internet penetration.
I don’t know how it is in the US, but at least in Finland it is getting to the point where you have to use the internet at work no matter what you do. I deliver newspapers and the subscription list is a net-based app on our smartphones and the office wants our overtime reports via email. My friend who is a janitor also sends his hours worked -lists via email. When minimum wage jobs like ours require internet access and computers or smart phones, you can bet both are getting really ubiquitous.
There’s still some old retired people who ignore the internet but as they eventually die out, internet usage is getting closer and closer to 100%.
Virtually everyone that can afford one has a mobile phone here. There are several submarine fiber optic cables to Europe and Brasil, and in 2016 they will launch a communications satellite. There are a great many internet cafe’s available in the major cities and internet access is available at no charge to all secondary schools. The biggest gap is access from homes. While it is available it is quite expensive and prone to failures, due primarily to poor infrastructure.
In Haiti, one of the poorest nations on earth, cell phones are ubiquitous - even in remote villages with no electricty or running water. A village will generally have a gas powered generator where everyone comes to charge their phone. The need for various charging adapters is overcome by wiring the power source directly to the battery terminals. A bit dangerous, but an occasional exploded battery is just collateral damage.