November 2010 - Chapter Ten:

A mobile phone future for India and China

>>> PDF Download: A mobile phone future for India and China [242 KB]
China and India have by far the largest concentration of mobile phones in the world. People embrace mobile phones for a range of reasons. Mobiles cost much less than computers, require relatively simple infrastructure, and even less technological knowledge. Because of the low cost of labour, mobile phones in developing countries are much cheaper and easier to repair than computers.
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By 2014 India will have the most mobile phones of any nation. That year India’s population is expected to hit 1.26 billion, and those people will be using 1.01 billion mobile phones. This represents a “tele-density” of 80 per cent. In other words, four out of every five Indians will have access to a mobile device by 2014.More than 60 per cent of China’s population of 1.34 billion owned a mobile phone as of September 2010, compared with less than 10 per cent at the start of the decade. The “tele-density” in Beijing and Shanghai was more than 90 per cent, according to estimates by BDA China, a British research firm based in Beijing. China’s three mobile-phone operators combined had 814 million subscribers by the end of July 2010, giving China the largest number of mobile phone subscriptions in the world. The country also has the largest number of Internet connections: 420 million as of June 2010, and predicted to jump to 469 million by the end of that year.

>>> PDF Download: A mobile phone future for India and China [242 KB]

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