Many years ago while at Arthur Andersen I had the opportunity to work on a series of projects looking at the impact, drivers, and opportunity around mobile communications – both satellite based as referenced in this post and terrestrial cellular build out.  During that time, I became acquainted with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) out of Geneva, Switzerland and their role in understanding, advocating, and setting policy around global telecommunications and their very Flash Gordon-like logo (to the left).

One of the many metrics that I spent a great deal of time analyzing for various markets was teledensity or the number of telephone lines per 100 people.  Fast forward 10+ years and this is now measured as "effective teledensity" which includes both mobile and fixed lines per 100 people.  Teledensity is an indicator of economic development for a country and those that are below 1 have a difficult if not impossible task of getting above it.  One was perceived to be the tipping point to accelerate the connectivity of a population and, by default, economic well-being. Moving from 10 to 30 is defined as the "teledensity transition" where at 30 the majority of households and nearly all businesses have access to telecommunications.

From the ITU:

For the developed economies in the Asia-Pacific region, it took between 8 and 35 years (average 16 years) to make the transition between 1935 and 1995, with a progressive acceleration over time. However, for a sample of developing economies in the same region, it took only between 2 and 6 years (average 3 years) to make the transition between 1995 and 2006.  The main difference between the two charts is that the developed countries made the transition using fixed-line networks, whereas the developing economies have invariably made the transition using mobile networks.

Don’t think that communications (especially mobile) is making an impact on the world, accelerating connectivity among people, and improving economies?  Think again.