7 Billion People on the Planet - How it Relates to Digital Divide?

COMPARE THE REACHES
If you use a fixed landline telephone, there are about 1.1 Billion phones that can ring. They can reach 3.7 Billion people, or 53% of the human population.

Radio receivers number 4.1 Billion in the absolute count, but are disproportionately in the wealthy countries. Only 4.2 Billion people worldwide are within reach of radio - which is still a very impressive 61% of the planet.
Television sets number only 1.7 Billion but are very evenly dispersed in those homes with electricity, and reach a potential target audience of 4.2 Billion people of age to understand TV programs. That is 61% of the planet's population. Of those TV audiences, about 74% have a DVD player, 55% have pay-TV like cable or satellite; and 26% have a gaming console.

Personal computers in the home are almost in half of homes, at 900 million in total - 49% of all households. Most are connected to the internet - but not all - 850 million PCs are, and they in turn have 900 million total internet users from the homes. Remember PC and internet users will add many hundreds of millions more from work, internet cafe's etc.

And then we have mobile. 5.8 Billion total active mobile phone accounts currently worldwide, or one for 83% of the planet. While that measure is increasingly misleading even the real numbers are impressive - the unique user count is now at 3.95 Billion - 56% of the planet - the number of mobile phone handsets in use is 4.6 Billion - and the reach of mobile when we include shared phones - becomes 4.7 Billion real people worldwide (of talking and reading age) which is 67% of the planet.

In a very real sense, mobile is the widest reaching technology ever, compared to other communication and media technologies. It now reaches past poverty, past electricity, past literacy. And while the youngest of the major technologies discussed here, it is still growing by far the fastest and it generates by far the most revenues. Mobile is the technology of this decade, perhaps even of this century.

All the stats in this essay are source: TomiAhonen Consulting October 2011. You may freely quote from this article, and make your own charts and tables and references. Just please mention my consultancy as the original source and provide a link if relevant in any item you might post online.

And a personal plug - if you need more stats and facts on the mobile industry, please see the TomiAhonen Almanac 2011 for more.