World to have more mobile connections than people by 2014

By 2014, there will be more cell phone accounts than people on Earth at the current growth rate for that service, the International Telecommunications Union says in a new report.

There are already more than 100 countries where the number of cell phone accounts exceeds their population, according to the ITU's "Measuring the Information Society 2012".

The ITU expects the number of cell phone accounts to rise from 6 billion now to 7.3 billion in 2014, compared with a global population of 7 billion.

China was the first country in the world to exceed 1 billion people and it will soon be followed by India.

Russia, with almost 250 million cell phone accounts, has 1.8 times as many cell phones as people, and Brazil, with 240 million accounts has 1.2 times as many cell phones as people.

Of the 6 billion cell phone accounts that currently exist, 1.1 billion are mobile-broadband, almost twice the number of fixed-broadband accounts.

The study points to China as the main market for smart phones and as home to a quarter of the world's internet users.

However, it also reveals deficiencies in the new technologies sector by noting that two-thirds of the world population still has no internet access.

While 75 percent of households in developing countries have television, only 20 percent are connected to the web.

With regard to the impact of these technologies on the economy, earnings from services related to information and communication technology totalled $1.5 trillion in 2010, or 2.4 percent of global GDP.