Can you remember your first cell phone? I stayed off the grid until around 2000, when I welcomed in the new millennium with a subscription plan for a paltry 150 minutes a month. Less than a decade later most adult Americans have cell phones, but they, like myself, are in the minority. As of this writing there are 555 million cell phone subscribers in China. There should be about 558 million next week.
These numbers shouldn’t be a shock to any of us, and yet it’s somewhat staggering to
imagine. It took 10 years from the first modern cell network phone for the U.S. to have more than 100 million subscribers. Look back a year ago and you’ll see that China had been adding about 6.8 million new subscribers a month. In January 2008, China added 8.48 million. The country undoubtedly saw yet another 8 million subscribers last month.
India lags behind China, but that billion-citizen country has a huge potential customer base. Even Pakistan is not insubstantial, with an estimated 77 million subscriber market. It’s no surprise China Mobile has a presence there.
Where does this all end? Aside from the coming storm over privacy issues in China, we’ll be seeing some interesting things technologically. Already, researchers are successfully mapping communications trends for both long-distance telephone and Internet protocol. Demand for constant Internet access worldwide will partner with trends in online personal computing to create a new worldwide standard. WiMax is only the first glimmer of that. I believe that eventually a person’s primary personal computer will not be a laptop. It will be a telephone. If not for the keyboard, it would be already.
