UN Agency Says Mobile Phones Now Generate More Revenue

GENEVA (AP)--Mobile phones are expected to generate greater revenue this year than traditional landlines with the nations of Africa, Asia and Latin America driving growth, a U.N. agency said Thursday.

Mobile phones, which account for 1.5 billion of the world's 2.7 billion telephone subscriptions, will make revenues of $480 million this year, compared with $450 million for landline phones, the International Telecommunication Union said in a report on global trends.

Just four years ago, fixed lines had revenues nearly double that of mobile networks, but mobile phone use - and revenues - has been growing rapidly. The growth is being driven by developing countries, where mobile phones are much cheaper to install than fixed lines.

Global use of mobile phones overtook landline phones about two years ago, according to the report.

"Virtually all the global growth in the telecoms service sector over the last decade has come from the mobile sector, broadband, and other data services," said Susan Schorr, one of the authors of the study.

"Taken together, the value of mobile and other non-voice services is now greater than that of the traditional fixed-line telephone service, which had been the mainstay of public telecommunication operators since the late 19th century," Schorr said.

The number of mobile phone subscribers in developing countries has snowballed to 829 million, up from just 3 million a decade ago, the study found. Since 2000, four-fifths of all growth in mobile phone sales took place in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the former Soviet Union, where fixed lines are often inadequate or unavailable.

"The developing world is ... where most of the potential for future growth resides," Schorr said.

China, India, and Russia were cited by ITU as the countries leading the way in the mobile revolution. In China alone, an average of 5.5 million new mobile phone users sign up each month, according to the government.

However, new Internet technologies, such as broadband, are still largely unavailable in many regions.

A meeting at the ITU this week of 85 national communications chiefs proposed a number of reforms for increasing Internet access throughout the world.

"Our job as regulators is to ensure that we are creating a climate that is conducive to these new technologies and allows these new technologies to deliver the products and services to our citizens," said Kathleen Abernathy, the Federal Communications Commissioner of the U.S and chairman of the ITU group.

Liberalizing markets, she argued, is necessary to "maximize the potential for everyone to benefit from all of these new technologies."

About 690 million people have access to the Internet today, but less than 40% of users come from the developing world, ITU said.

But the report said that broadband seems to be catching on in developing countries as well. In 2003, there were 11 million new subscribers in China, which is expected to overtake the U.S. this year as the world's largest broadband market, Schorr said.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires "

Posted to the site on 9th December 2004