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| Huge growth in the communications
sector of China, India, Russia and Brazil during 2006 had
been largely spurred on by a boom in
mobile phones, according to a recent report from the
British media and telecommunications watchdog, Ofcom. The
findings of their research in the
Ofcom International Communications Report indicate that
the ordinary and everyday
mobile phone offers 53% of the total international telecoms
revenue.
The
mobile phone deal in India is astonishing. In 2006,
India added more mobile phone subscribers than Britain
has in total – yet only 14% of the Indian population actually
has a mobile phone.
Interesting findings also include that mobile
phone users in China sent a whopping 429 billion SMS in
2006, which works out at about an annual 967 text messages
per user (they must have a lot people who reply with a
superfluous “ok”, when agreement is obviously implied…).
This figure places China at the top of world texting rankings,
and makes me realise that I’m going to have to lift my
game if I want to compete in this field! (I could possibly
have sent almost 967 in the ten years that I’ve had a
mobile phone, which is a pretty poor effort considering
most of those years have either been spent in the far-from-technophobic
years of my teens and early 20s!)
A
2004 study from the Global System for Mobile Communication
(GSM) indicated that the Germans were Europe’s top texters,
with 200 million messages per year, almost tripling the
75 million of the second-placed Finns and British 70 million.
GSM accredits the huge German SMS figure to a telecommunications
network that was patchy until German unification in 1990.
The
high rates of the West Germany monopoly and the lack
of an individual phone in East Germany meant that many
chose a mobile phone rather than a landline when the option
was available. The cost of making a mobile phone call
still prohibitive, many opted for the
mobile phone offered
fixed rate of a text message to get their message acr
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