Earlier this month ABI Research predicted there'd be 5 billion mobile phones worldwide by the end of the year… yet a few days later Ericsson estimated there were already 5 million mobiles.
Now the GSMA – one of the mobile industry's global trade associations – has confirmed the 5 billion figure, putting its weight behind recent figures from Wireless Intelligence. It points out that the last million subscribers were added in 18 months – and says we'll add another million in little over another year and a half. 74% of the world's population now has a mobile phone; penetration in Western Europe is 130%.