26 years in the making, worldwide mobile subscriptions have reached 3.3 billion according to research firm Informa Telecoms and Media. As of, oh, right now, the US Census Bureau puts the global population at 6,634,545,153. This doesn't mean that half the world has a cell phone, since 59 countries have mobile penetration of over 100 percent, meaning at least some people have more than one subscription. I--gadget yuppie that I am--have 17.
"The mobile industry has constantly outperformed even the most optimistic forecasts for subscriber growth," Mark Newman, head of research at Informa said in a statement. "For children growing up today the issue is not whether they will get a mobile phone, it's a question of when."
More importantly, this opens up the door for Google, which recently released an open platform for mobile phones and just announced its intent to bid in the FCC's upcoming wireless spectrum auction, to put a little something in pockets around the world.
Also, South Koreans around the world--but mostly in South Korea--now have more excuses for the when they accidentally kill their coworkers with a construction vehicle: "It must have been his phone blowing up. I mean, come on, there's so many of them. It could totally look like he got hit with a backhoe."
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