Thaindian News

UNITED NATIONS (BNO NEWS) – Nearly two billion additional mobile telephone connections were recorded across the world between 2006 and last year, the majority of them in developing countries, the United Nations Telecommunications Union (ITU) announced.

More than 1.6 billion of the 1.9 billion new cellular telephone lines were in developing or poor countries, compared to the fewer than 300 million in the developed world, according to the ITU statistics. Additionally, there are 57 million less fixed telephone lines at the end of 2009 than there were at the end of 2006.

In a number of developing countries, more than half of rural households now have a mobile phone. In China and India, the two most populous countries in the world, over 90 percent of villages are connected to mobile phones.

The agency also found that 75 percent of households worldwide have television sets, but only 25 percent have access to the internet. While close to two-thirds of people in the developed world have access to the internet, four fifths of people in the developing world do not.

The ITU noted, however, that most of the internet growth is taking place in the developing world, which accounted for 600 million of the 777 million new internet users worldwide between the end of 2005 and the end of last year. By the end of 2006, there were more internet users in the developing world than in the developed world, and in four years to the end of 2009, fixed broadband penetration rates in the developing world almost tripled, and mobile broadband grew more than tenfold, according to ITU statistics.

This information comes as both a positive and a negative, as more people in India have access to mobile phones than working toilets, according to the United Nations. While the developing world may be quickly adopting modern technologies and conveniences, they’re still struggling to get access to the basics.