Wireless Intelligence, the research arm of the GSMA, has carried out research that shows the number of unique connected mobile users globally, rather than the total number of connections. The research showed that global penetration by users stands at 45%. In other words, 55% of the world’s population still don’t have a mobile phone, or other connected mobie device.
So, the obvious questions to ask are, how did Wireless Intelligence arrive at this number, and should we trust it?
What it did, over a three year period, was carry out a load of online surveys. 16,000 people were surveyed online in 39 countries across the world, with the crucial question being how many SIMs they had. Across all 16,000 users, the average number of SIMs per user was 1.85. The total number of active connections was then divided by that average number:
So Total Connections ÷ Average number of SIMs per user = Total unique users. On a global basis, that means 5.9 billion (total active connections, not counting M2M) ÷ 1.85 (average number of SIMs per user) = 3.2 billion unique users.
Let's take the UK as an example. In the UK, the survey showed that on average users have 1.34 SIMs. (Wireless Intelligence carried out its UK survey in 2009). WI then took the total number of active connections in the UK, and divided it by 1.34. It expressed that result as a % of total population, and it turned out that in the UK 87% of the total population, including the young and old, has a mobile connection. Some mobile operators do not report active/inactive connections, so where operators did not report those numbers, WI used an estimated number.
The Office of National Statistics suggests there are, give or take, about 60 million people in the entire UK. So 87% of 60 million is 52 million unique subscribers. WI seems, therefore, to have estimated that the UK has about 69.5 million active connections.
Does that tally with what the operators tell us? Well, if you add up what the operators report as their subscriber numbers, it comes to 76 million (27 million EE, 19 million Vodafone, 22 million O2, 8 million Three). Divide that by 1.34 and you get 56.7 million – which is 94.5% of 60 million. That's a little bit higher than WI's number, but may well be accounted for by those subs numbers having risen since 2009, and also some subs in there that wouldn't have made it through WI's active subs criteria.
What about Ofcom? Ofcom states there were 81.6 million mobile subscriptions in the UK at the end of 2011. Ofcom also said that at the end of Q1 2012, 92% of UK adults had a phone. Again, the number of subs is much higher than WI's figures. But the penetration stat, given the numbers are for adults only, looks in line with WI's.
The two crucial numbers, of course, are the number of SIMs per user – is 16,000 enough of a sample globally to make these assumptions – and the total active connections. With those in place, though, this seems to be a very useful bit of research from WI, giving a very different picture of how mobile connectivity is distributed across the globe.
Keith Dyer
Editor
Mobile Europe