ITU’s 2009 ICT Development Index
ITU has released the ICT Development Index for 2009 – a study that looks into “level of advancement of ICTs in more than 150 countries worldwide and compares progress made between 2002 and 2007“. It has received a fair amount of online coverage and somewhat limited dead tree media coverage.
The results are pretty amazing- there are over 4 billion mobile subscribers globally, a penetration rate of 61.1% . The details for mobile telephony growth are even more intriguing:
009 figures for Global Mobile penetration (Source: ITU)
The devil is of course in the details – how sustainable and equitable it is, specifically what are the factors that drove this growth, etc – but mobile telephony in the developing world has never looked so good.