Tim Worstall at the Adam Smith Insitute blog:
Almost at random from my RSS feed two little bits of information that tell of the quite astonishing economic changes going on around us at present. The first, that the world is now pretty much wired:
According to new figures published by the International Telecommunications Union on Thursday, the global population has purchased 6 billion cellphone subscriptions.
Note that this is not phones, this is actual subscriptions. It’s not quite everyone because there are 7 billion humans and there’s always the occasional Italain with two phones, one for the wife and one for the mistress. But in a manner that has never before been true almost all of the population of the planet are in theory at least able to speak to any one other member of that population. The second:
The most recent CTIA data, obtained by All Things D, shows that US carriers handled 1.16 trillion megabytes of data between July 2011 and June 2012, up 104 percent from the 568 billion megabytes used between July 2010 and June 2011.
Within that explosive growth of basic communications we’re also seeing the smartphone sector boom. Indeed, I’ve seen figures that suggest that over half of new activations are now smartphones, capable of fully interacting with the internet.
One matter to point to is how fast this all is. It really is only 30 odd years: from mobile telephony being the preserve of the rich with a car battery to power it to something that the rural peasant of India or China is more likely to own than not. Trickle down economics might have a bad reputation but trickle down technology certainly seems to work.
