About two billion people world-wide are now hooked on to a mobile phone as personal digital technology expands at a revolutionary pace and starts to have a pervasive impact on people's lives, the UN's telecommunications agency said on Saturday.
The growth in the use of devices that link up to global digital networks is far outstripping any other communications medium in history, according to the International Telecommunications Union's "Internet Report 2006: Digital.Life". "We're in the midst of a digital revolution," said one of the report's authors, Lara Srivastava.
One person in two on the planet is expected to be a mobile phone user within two years, said the report coinciding with the opening of the Telecom World 2006 trade fair in Hong Kong. "Around one in three people on the planet own a digital mobile phone today and they're hard pressed to be separated from it," Srivastava told journalists.
The trend is transforming not only business transactions, but is also starting to have a deep impact on the way people interact and their privacy, the report warned.
The Internet and mobile communications are now the prime leisure time medium for under-55 year-olds, outstripping television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and cinema, according to data compiled by the ITU.
While it took 125 years for fixed line telephone connections to break through the 1.0 billion mark in 2001, the mobile telephone took just 21 years to reach the same level a year later, the report said. Fixed line connections have since grown at a much slower rate to over 1.2 billion users, but cellphone use has continued its rapid expansion.
"What's remarkable is that the second billion was reached in just three years and most likely with current trends we have three billion users, one for every two people on the planet. by the end of 2008," said co-author Tim Kelly, head of the ITU's policy and strategy unit.
The ITU estimates that Internet and communications technology markets - consumer electronics, broadcasting, telecoms, computers and services - are worth about 3.13 trillion dollars or 7.0 percent of global Gross Domestic Product.
Growth rates in the sector since the 1990s have been "frenetic", shrugging off the burst "Internet bubble", when booming ICT stocks collapsed in 2000, Kelly said.
"Many people thought that was the death of the Internet as a business phenomenon. In fact nothing could be further from the truth," he added. High speed broadband networks reached 277 million subscribers at the beginning of 2006, including 61 million mobile ones.
The report sounded a note of caution about the step into "digital lifestyles". Srivastava said individuals were increasingly being tied into the flow of knowledge and information over global electronic networks and were assuming a "digital identity" that could easily slide out of their control.
Personal data exchanged on the Internet ranges from one's real name or multiple usernames and passwords, to social security numbers, credit card data for business use, or more on social networking sites like My Space or through e-mail and text messaging.
"The fact that we now have an always-on mobile phone, that we have cookies that track our online behaviour, have invaded our privacy a little bit," Srivastava said.
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