Worldwide mobile phone distribution

Daily Infographics (2012) The World of Mobile Phones, January 20

I’m posting this infographic, because the Canadian government is looking at changing the rules about foreign ownership of telecommunications companies.

It can be seen that Canada has a relatively low penetration of mobile phones, because it has some of the highest charges. There are three main companies in Canada, and opening up the market to foreign competition and tweaking the rules to give smaller companies connections to the main networks at reasonable cost is considered to be the best way to get the rates down.

One reason some countries though have high mobile phone ownership is because there is no reliable terrestrial phone network. Mobile is the only form of access in some countries. Nevertheless, there is no such reason to explain why Canada has less mobile phones per person than say Chile or Germany.

Just as important though is the bandwidth – with increasing demands for video and graphics, the availability of broadband access is as important as the number of phones per person.

I’d like to see a similar map for tablet ownership.

I’ve shown only a portion of the whole graphic. The full graphic (and many other fascinating graphics) can be found at Daily Infographics