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List of countries by mobile phones in use
- jhcl 7y agoThe dutch numbers are from 2009, although somehow they claim to be from 2013. Some numbers (from other countries) are from 2019 so what they are comparing are the number in 2009 in one country to the number of another country in 2019. The list is alright but don't put rankings in front of it as it's apples and oranges.
- resonantjacket5 7y agoIt's pretty hard to get the data from every year
- adventured 7y agoThe list as is seems to be of low value, beyond stating what most people would have likely already assumed to be true. There are 74 countries on the list and only three have very unusually low figures: Cuba, North Korea, Ethiopia. The first two are obvious, the last one has probably changed a lot since ~2013. After that you spike up to Lebanon at 64 phones per 100 people, with data from 2010. So that's probably 90+ now. The extreme majority of all adults globally now have a mobile phone, even if it's a $20 KaiOS phone.
- huac 7y agoEthiopia is at least 62.6 million now (https://ethiodailypost.com/2018/02/20/ethio-telecom-mobile-subscriber-base-hits-62-6mln/ https://ethiodailypost.com/2018/02/20/ethio-telecom-mobile-s...) -- guess is that many of these numbers are not kept up to date.
- Wowfunhappy 7y agoI find sorting by connections per 100 citizens to be significantly more insightful, since that controls for overall population size. Hong Kong is at the top that way...
- jldugger 7y agoSo what accounts for HK's 2.5:1 connections:person ratio? Carrying multiple phones? Phone plus laptop/watch/ipad? Edit: or maybe multiple sims per phone
- kypro 7y agoWouldn't a mobile number, a home number and Skype number count? I wondered if perhaps some of these are also business numbers? Unless they were excluded?
- yorwba 7y agoAlso people buying Hong Kong sims for access to uncensored internet by roaming in Mainland China.
- chirau 7y agoIn many countries people carry more than one phone/SIM card. Mostly for separation of concerns, i.e business and pleasure. Also for tariffs across providers. It isn't unusual to have one carrier better for data and another for voice/sms. Another significant factor is contacts. If your contacts are on one network and you are on another, there is enough motivation to get a second device as intra-network is cheaper than cross-network
- Lordarminius 7y agoAlso, an extra SIM card is a useful option in case one network goes down.
- wodenokoto 7y agoIt is, but the comparison cannot be done, since the numbers vary from 2013 (2009 according to another top comment) and 2019. The percentage would be cool to compare across countries, but sadly it is not possible with this data.
- Zenst 7y agoIt would be interesting to know what prevalence of dual-sim phones are in those countries. Equally tourist levels as there appears to be no single definition of active phone numbers per country. Do they include roaming numbers, some may, some may not. But no single source for this data set and each number set has its own source for that data, which have no standard metric across all sources for how they are measured. But certainly a more insightful way of viewing this data than the totals alone.
- deeg 7y agoSorting by "connections/100 people" is interesting. The top appears to be correlated somewhat to oppressive governments but only loosely (Costa Rica?).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kratom_sandwich 7y agoInteresting. I would love to see a number for Austria - until this month, it was IIRC one of the few EU countries which didn't require any form of identification for a prepaid phone.
- deevious 7y agoIt was the same for Romania but that is about to change because of a kidnapping/murder case and a media shitstorm regarding fake emergency number calls and geotracking of callers.
- Hamuko 7y agoFinland still doesn't require identification for prepaid SIM cards.
- fyfy18 7y agoSame with Lithuania. You can pick them up from supermarkets and news stands for a few euro.
- buckminster 7y agoUK as well. They are not as common as they used to be but they are still available.
- maartn 7y agoby Mobile PHONE NUMBERS in use
- dasil003 7y agoWhy is Indonesia out of order?
- yorwba 7y agoBecause manually updating the ranking is annoying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_countries_by_number_of_mobile_phones_in_use#Does_the_.22Ranking.22_represent_anything.3F https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_countries_by_numb...
- paggle 7y agoWhat macro factors tend to influence the connections/100 citizens? I don't see what Panama, Sri Lanka, Finland, and Saudi Arabia would have in common to have such a high number of phone numbers per capita.
- Hamuko 7y agoThe world's first GSM call was made in Finland. The first mass-produced GSM phone, the Nokia 1011, was also made in Finland. Finland may perhaps be the outlier when it comes to phones.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- singularity2001 7y agoWhat happened to Ethiopia vs Nigeria (20% vs 90% coverage)?? In my model of the world the development index was reciprocal.
- sambal 7y agoI’d revise that model, as a general rule West Africa is more stable and developed than the east, especially so when your neighbors are the Sudans and Somalia..