List of countries by mobile phones in use | Hacker News Reader

List of countries by mobile phones in use

en.wikipedia.org

54 pointssnazz27 comments

The dutch numbers are from 2009, although somehow they claim to be from 2013. Some numbers (from other countries) are from 2019 so what they are comparing are the number in 2009 in one country to the number of another country in 2019. The list is alright but don't put rankings in front of it as it's apples and oranges.

It's pretty hard to get the data from every year

The list as is seems to be of low value, beyond stating what most people would have likely already assumed to be true.

There are 74 countries on the list and only three have very unusually low figures: Cuba, North Korea, Ethiopia. The first two are obvious, the last one has probably changed a lot since ~2013.

After that you spike up to Lebanon at 64 phones per 100 people, with data from 2010. So that's probably 90+ now.

The extreme majority of all adults globally now have a mobile phone, even if it's a $20 KaiOS phone.

Ethiopia is at least 62.6 million now (https://ethiodailypost.com/2018/02/20/ethio-telecom-mobile-s...) -- guess is that many of these numbers are not kept up to date.

I find sorting by connections per 100 citizens to be significantly more insightful, since that controls for overall population size.

Hong Kong is at the top that way...

So what accounts for HK's 2.5:1 connections:person ratio? Carrying multiple phones? Phone plus laptop/watch/ipad?

Edit: or maybe multiple sims per phone

Wouldn't a mobile number, a home number and Skype number count?

I wondered if perhaps some of these are also business numbers? Unless they were excluded?

Also people buying Hong Kong sims for access to uncensored internet by roaming in Mainland China.

In many countries people carry more than one phone/SIM card. Mostly for separation of concerns, i.e business and pleasure.

Also for tariffs across providers. It isn't unusual to have one carrier better for data and another for voice/sms.

Another significant factor is contacts. If your contacts are on one network and you are on another, there is enough motivation to get a second device as intra-network is cheaper than cross-network

Also, an extra SIM card is a useful option in case one network goes down.

It is, but the comparison cannot be done, since the numbers vary from 2013 (2009 according to another top comment) and 2019.

The percentage would be cool to compare across countries, but sadly it is not possible with this data.

It would be interesting to know what prevalence of dual-sim phones are in those countries. Equally tourist levels as there appears to be no single definition of active phone numbers per country. Do they include roaming numbers, some may, some may not. But no single source for this data set and each number set has its own source for that data, which have no standard metric across all sources for how they are measured.

But certainly a more insightful way of viewing this data than the totals alone.

I'm not surprised by Hong Kong, but why are Canada and Australia so low?

Also Maldives at #2. Population: 392,473 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maldives

Interesting. I would love to see a number for Austria - until this month, it was IIRC one of the few EU countries which didn't require any form of identification for a prepaid phone.

It was the same for Romania but that is about to change because of a kidnapping/murder case and a media shitstorm regarding fake emergency number calls and geotracking of callers.

Finland still doesn't require identification for prepaid SIM cards.

Same with Lithuania. You can pick them up from supermarkets and news stands for a few euro.

UK as well. They are not as common as they used to be but they are still available.

What macro factors tend to influence the connections/100 citizens? I don't see what Panama, Sri Lanka, Finland, and Saudi Arabia would have in common to have such a high number of phone numbers per capita.

The world's first GSM call was made in Finland. The first mass-produced GSM phone, the Nokia 1011, was also made in Finland. Finland may perhaps be the outlier when it comes to phones.

by Mobile PHONE NUMBERS in use

Sorting by "connections/100 people" is interesting. The top appears to be correlated somewhat to oppressive governments but only loosely (Costa Rica?).

What happened to Ethiopia vs Nigeria (20% vs 90% coverage)?? In my model of the world the development index was reciprocal.

I’d revise that model, as a general rule West Africa is more stable and developed than the east, especially so when your neighbors are the Sudans and Somalia..

Why is Indonesia out of order?

Because manually updating the ranking is annoying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:List_of_countries_by_numb...

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