More Mobiles Than Germans

The German Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media (BITKOM) has reported that Germany's mobile phone penetration level has passed the 100% mark - implying that there are now more active SIM cards than people living in the country.

At the begining of this month, Bitkom calculates that there was a total of 82.8 million mobile phone accounts in Germany compared with a population of about 82 million.

When mobile phones were launched back in 1992, the country ended the first year with less than one million customers. By the end of 1996, this had slowly risen to 5.6 million. The real boom occurred in 1999 and 2000 as PrePay services were launched.

The Association also noted that there are now over 4 million 3G subscribers - a sharp rise on the 2.3 million at the end of last year.

The Mobile World subscriber database gave a breakdown of the market share - based on subscriber numbers from a couple of months ago. T-Mobile is the market leader with just over 38% of the market, with Vodafone coming second with just over 34% of the market. E-Plus has just under 14% of the market while O2 has just over 13% market share."

Posted to the site on 15th August 2006