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Comment by isalmon | Hacker News Reader

>> Russia has over 180m mobile subscribers

The whole population is 143M (2011) including infants and very old people. How is it possible? Multiple phones per person?

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Brazil has around 190 million people[1] with about 249 million mobile phone lines enabled [2].

People that have more than one line usually buy one line from each provider so they can talk "for free" between the same providers. It is not uncommon for people to ask you what is your provider so they will mark it and call from a phone that uses that provider when trying to reach you.

We also have a high number of people with phones that allow multiple providers with one device.

Business and personal cellphones are not uncommon either.

[1] http://www.ibge.gov.br/home/estatistica/populacao/censo2010/... [2] http://extra.globo.com/noticias/celular-e-tecnologia/quinto-...

To make a example as brazillian:

My close family is 4 people (my dad, mom, me, sister).

We have 6 lines from one carrier (we got it in a special package, we use 1 line per person + 2 backup lines for whatever we need, since those lines can call very cheap each other, one use for backup line for example is borrow it to extended family)

Also my dad has one workplace line with another carrier, and a Nextel Android.

And I had for a while a extra line to communicate cheaply with people of the same carrier, thus in total we have 9 mobile phone lines for 4 people.

Sometimes you see particularly important business people (like a CEO) here walking with 4 or 5 phones on his belt (one of each carrier + 1 for strictly personal stuff)

A CEO is carrying 5 phones on his belt so he can save a few pennies using same-carrier free calling? What, does he have those 5 numbers also printed on his business card?

In most countries the caller pays, not the callee. So he is saving his callers money, not himself.

Depends.

First, there is the issue that here in Brazil previously we had a government monopoly on telephony, and the breakup was made along geographic lines, those are not strictly enforced anymore, but carriers sometimes still don't work at all in certain states, while other carriers work in those states (And don't work in other states), thus people that travel a lot have no choice but to own multiple lines.

Also, carriers here tend to have wildly different packages, that are advantageous in different situations.

And yes, sometimes people DO put several phones on their cards, usually whoever deals directly with sales (ie: salesmen, marketing, or CEO of small companies)

I have seen it in another Eastern European country - the sum of all mobile subscribers each operator claimed to have, exceeded the population by 50%. I attribute it mostly to marketing tricks like counting pre-paid cards that have not been explicitly canceled towards the general tally of active users. In general the operators try to appear to have more subscribers in order to entice more new subscribers to choose them.

I seriously doubt that the telecom regulatory bodies in these parts of Europe pay much attention to the coverage/subscription rates claimed by the mobile operators' marketing departments.

Of course some of the people have more than one SIM card, but with at least 3 major operators this simply doesn't add up.

EDIT: added the sentence about the lack of regulation

Here in Portugal, we have 124 active cellphone plans per 100 people, and the numbers are published by a governmental agency, not the carriers.

It's not that odd: even I, who barely makes calls, have two SIM cards (on a dual-SIM phone), for personal and work related calls. My teenage brother has three (one for each carrier).

Almost everyone uses prepaid, so there's really no cost associated with getting another SIM card - you just pay for what you use.

Several factors: people use separate phones for business (paid by employer usually) and personal calls, often people have phones from different operators, because of significant discount for calls within the same network, illegal immigrants that do not get counted in the census also own mobile phones (sometimes several phones, like I mentioned)

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=scatter+plot+of+number+...

many countries fall above the y=x line in this plot for example

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=mobile+phone+users%2Fpo...

I currently have 2 SIMs for 2 different Russian regions. Calls via local SIM are cheaper. Even for the same operator. And I think I have 5 or more abandoned SIMs for more regions I've been to. And this is a norm. I'm surprised the number is not higher.

I think the definition of subscriber could do with some definition - presumably it means the number of sims as this thread suggests prepaid is the majority of the market. If this was applied to me, I'd count as about 8.

Business and personal phones? Lots of 'Russian Business' around the web.

Montenegro has population of ~600.000 people and ~1.200.000 mobile subscribers.

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