According to this table, there were already 70 million cell phone subscriptions in America as early as 1998!
I personally find that hard to believe as it goes against my memory. That’s about 1 phone for every 3 people, which would mean the majority of households and couples were already cell phone users in 1998. My memory is that cell phone users didn’t become the majority (ie over 50 percent) until about the year 2000 and didn’t start entering the hands of teenagers until about 2002. My parents didn’t have a cell phone until 2002 or 2003.
Do you think the numbers include people who owned pagers? I know those were still very popular in 1998, probably moreso than having a mobile phone.
1998 is right around the time new area codes started springing up all over the place in order to accommodate the cell providers, so that number sounds about right to me.
I worked for a tech company back then and my department had about 10 “floater” cell phones that you’d take with you when you traveled for business or had to be on call for some reason. We were a department of 15-20 people. So we’d fit in the “1 phone for every 3 people metric.” And that was just my department. Some departments (such as sales and field service) issued a phone to every staff member.
I was just looking and apparently 36 percent of households had a cell phone in 1998. That sounds more correct to me than 60 or 70 percent. My memory is that in 1998 most people used landlines for social purposes and cell phones were still primarily business tools. I don’t remember a widespread “cell phone culture” until about the time 9/11 happened. Until then the number of minutes you were allotted were extremely limited.
If car phones count in the metric, you could have cases of people doubling up - one for themselves and one for their car. But that’s probably earlier than 1998.
By '98, people were already commenting that every high school and middle school kid seemed to have a cellphone (I know, I’d just graduated high school). Brick phones were well behind us and, three years later, the first phones able to run games would be coming out in the US. (Which was about 3 years behind Japan.) So these were small, easily portable devices. Blackberries and other devices were pretty popular, too.
I can’t speak for the USA, but my memory is that 1998 was the year that mobile phone ownership became common in the UK (and it was the year I got my first phone). I remember at the start of 1997 only very few people I knew had mobile, but by the end of 1998 most people (including myself and all my friends) in their late teens twenties had one.
Really? I mean, maybe some rich and spoiled kids had them, but I don’t remember there being a texting or teenage cell phone culture on a large scale until 2002 or 2003. I doubt more than 5 percent of teenagers had their own cell phone in 1998.
But yeah, it only took about 8 or 9 years to go from Clueless to 30-40 percent of teenagers having phones in high school. I think by about 2005-2006 the majority of high schools had a phone in the US.
My family had two cell phones around '99. I kept one under the seat of my truck for emergencies and I wasn’t any where near the only kid who had one. I bough my own cell phone in '02 because every kid on the team would be calling their parents with results and I got tired of sitting there doing nothing. So we had 2 for 4 in '99 and I think we moved to 3/4 by '02.
It would also depend on where you lived during that period. Protoboard, I think you mentioned in other posts that you live in a small town. I was in college in Southern California during this period, with mostly middle to upper middle class students, and by 1998 a noticeable number of students had cell phones. I didn’t have one at the time, but more than 1/3 of people in my social circle already had them. I would say that 1999-2000 was the turning point and a majority of people in my area (including myself) had gotten cell phones.
US population was 275.85 million in 1998. That’s about 1 in 4 people not 1 in 3. Trying to make the link to households is problematic because you don’t know the distribution. I’d assume households that were relatively adopters had more than one. In households that had two adult heads of household one cell didn’t get you much if you wanted to contact one of the people you talk to most unless they were a stay at home parent.
The numbers quoted in the statistic, I assume, cover all mobile accounts which include not only voice phones for private and business use, but also also accounts for cellular devices that are not phones. Mobile data wasn’t really much of a thing back in 1998 IIRRC, but there are also monitoring devices that send information/alerts via text, and I wonder if some pioneering applications were deployed back then. The company I work at certainly researched such applications (but IIRRC had not deployed them in production) back then.
My company issued cell phones to all our field techs (which was most of the company’s employees) sometime around the '89 to '93 timeframe, and most of the other companies we worked with, at least the senior people on any jobsite had a company phone, so even if private individuals didn’t have them, quite a big percentage had one through their job by the early '90s.
In my industry damn near everybody had personal cellphones well before then. I was one of the last of my coworkers to get one and that was in 1994. By 1998 I was on at least my second device. And as **DinoR **suggested above, when we first got them my household didn’t get one; it got two.
Admittedly mobile phones were made to order for my industry and most of my coworkers were upper-middle class or above. So both utility and affordability were high.
I could easily imagine darn few mobile phones in rural America in 1998. But meanwhile in suburbia there would be upwards of 75% penetration among adults.
Also, another data point, I switched companies in '98 (same industry, same job, different city) and the new company only had pagers for everyone and a couple of roving cell phones for anyone on a job that needed it, but a good 1/3 or more of our people had personal cell phones by then, so that fits the 1/3 of households in '98.