Have mobile phones killed the landline?

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It is easy to forget how rapidly mobile phones have taken over. A decade ago, there were fewer than 500m mobile subscriptions, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Now there are about 4.6 billion (see chart). Penetration rates have risen steeply everywhere. In rich countries subscriptions outnumber the population. Even in poor countries more than half the inhabitants have gone mobile. Dial a number and the odds are three to one that it will cause a mobile phone, rather than a fixed-line one, to ring somewhere on the planet.

As airtime gets cheaper, the untethered masses tend to use their mobiles more. In early 2000 an average user spoke for 174 minutes a month, according to the GSM Association (GSMA), an industry group. By early 2009 that had risen to 261 minutes, which suggests that humanity spends over 1 trillion minutes a month on mobiles, or nearly 2m years. Nobody can keep track of the flood of text messages. One estimate suggests that American subscribers alone sent over 1 trillion texts in 2008, almost treble the number sent the previous year.

Hat tip: Marginal Revolution

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