GENEVA-Until the end of the year, the number of cellphones in the world comes close to the number of inhabitants on the planet. The data are being released by the International Telecommunication Union and reveal the explosion in the use of this technology, even in emerging countries. Have Internet access, although also grow, still reveals the profound disparity between rich countries and developing economies. The Brazil, for example, had in 2012 the same network penetration rates that rich countries ten years earlier.
But it is in the sector of mobile phones that the difference between rich and poor is the smallest. Until December, the number of mobile phones will reach close to 7 billion, representing 96% of all inhabitants.
The penetration of mobile phones will reach 90% in emerging markets, against more than 120% in rich economies. The expansion, in ten years, was almost ten times. The situation is even more complicated in Africa, where 30% of the population still has no access to.
But the market is also showing signs of saturation. In 2014, the industry must have the smallest growth in years, with a global expansion of only 2.6%. The only real growth occurs in developing countries, representing 75% of all cell phones sold in the world.
While the number of cell phones increases, the record of landlines suffers a fall in the world. Between 2009 and 2013, the world lost 100 million landlines. In Europe, the number of people who even have a fixed number grows enough to surprise even the phone companies.
Internet usage in mobile phones also recorded a strong increase. Today, there are 2.3 billion users, 32% of the world's population. The rate is two times higher than the figures of 2011. Once again, the disparity between rich and poor is big. Emerging us, the rate is only 21%, against more than 84% in rich countries.
This difference, according to the ITU, will start to reduce. In 2014, it is expected a 26% expansion in internet usage on mobile phones in emerging countries, compared with only 11% in rich countries.
This fee will allow, in absolute figures, the largest number of have emerging internet users on mobile at the end of 2014. But in terms of percentage of population with access to Europe's leading, followed by the Americas, with more than 500 million users.
Internet. The advancement of technologies in emerging countries also changed the profile of the Internet. Today, two out of every three Internet users are in the developing world. That number has doubled in five years and, by the end of 2014, 3 billion people will be connected to the worldwide network of computed. According to the ITU, 40% of the world will be on the network until the end of the year.
The Brazil, however, presents a lag of a decade as compared to equivalent penetration rates that existed in rich countries.
The latest data available on ITU about Brazil are the end of 2012 and show that 49.8% of the population had access to the Internet. The rate represents a substantial jump compared to data from 2003, when only 13% of the population had access to the network. But, still, the numbers are regarded as modest by experts.
In world rankings, Brazil appears only in local position with 85a the greater access for its population at the end of 2012. In the USA, 81% of the population has access to the network and, in the Scandinavian countries the rate surpasses the mark of 95%.
The Brazil, for example, is more than ten years late compared to rates of penetration of the Internet in Canada. In 2000, 51% of the country's population of North America already had access to the network. In Norway, for 14 years, the rate was higher than the Brazilian. Switzerland and USA are some of the other countries that, at the turn of the century, had already more than 50% of its population connected.
The disparity between developed and emerging countries is also clear in other regions of the world. Today, the access of the population to live in Europe, USA or Japan to the Internet at home came close to a saturation point. Emerging us, only 30% have access to the network in their homes.
The Brazil also does not appear in good position as regards the number of people with broadband Internet access. The rate of those with access to the highest speed reaches only 3 for every hundred people.
The disparity in the speed of the network is what most concerns the ITU. Africa, for example, has only 0.5% of the number of Internet users with access to the most advanced technology. In the Americas, the rate is 17%, but the region will have the lowest growth in the world in 2014, with only 2.5% expansion of this service. The rate of expansion of this segment in emerging markets also fell, to 18% in 2011 to just 6% in 2014.
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