Thank you China and India. The two most populous countries in the world also, without surprise, sport the largest cell phone use by number and fuel most of the latest gains for worldwide phone usage. Telephone service has quadrupled in the past decade to 4 billion lines worldwide, according to a report from the UN telecommunications agency.




The International Telecommunications Union counts 1.27 billion fixed lines and 2.68 billion mobile accounts. The total number of people represented by those figures is unclear because many people, particularly in industrial countries, have both kinds of service.

The increase has been especially strong in developing countries that have been able to provide cellular phone service to tens of millions of people much more cheaply than having to wire up homes and offices for fixed-line telephones. Of course, if you're developed enough for a cell phone, then you're going to be looking for more oil next too. Uh oh America, trouble brewing--and you can't invade China :P

61 percent of the world's mobile subscribers are in developing countries, the ITU said. China and India, for example, together added almost 200 million mobile subscribers to the global total in the first three months of this year.

In 1996 there were fewer than 1 billion fixed-line and mobile phone subscribers altogether. Fixed-line subscriptions have grown slowly since then. Growth is also picking up in Africa, thanks to advances in technology that enable broadband connections over mobile phones.

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