Yahoo News There are now more mobile phones on the planet than there are people
If you’ve ever looked around a train carriage and seen every single person staring into a phone, you may be unsurprised to learn that the devices now outnumber us.
In fact, they have done for a few years, and there are now almost one billion more mobile connections than there are people, according to data from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the World Bank, and the UN.
There are now 8.98 billion mobile connections on Earth, far larger than the world population of 7.69 billion, according to UN analysts.
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This doesn’t mean that everyone has a mobile: in fact, there are still 1.1 billion people on Earth who don’t have regular access to electricity.
But people who own more than one device, along with other SIM-enabled devices such as ‘internet of things’ devices and connected cars make up the rest.
Half of the world’s population are now using the internet, according to ITU estimates.
At the end of 2018, 51.2 per cent of the global population, or 3.9 billion people, were using the Internet.
