What Is Attached to Our Global ICT Infrastructure?
Submitted by Matt on Fri, 07/09/2010 - 15:50
How much gear is attached to the edges of our global ICT infrastructure? Our latest estimate yields over 13 billion items, driven by mobile devices.
| Device Type | 2010 Estimate (billions) |
| Mobile Devices | 5.4 |
| Radios | 2.4 |
| Televisions | 2.0 |
| Land Lines | 1.3 |
| PCs | 1.0 |
| Consumer Broadband CPE (modems, routers, etc.) | 0.4 |
| TV Boxes: Cable, Sat, DTV, DVR | 0.3 |
| Personal Music Players | 0.2 |
| Navigation Systems* | 0.1 |
|
|
|
Total Items | 13.1 |
*Turn-by-turn navigation systems excluding smart phones, which are counted under Mobile Devices
Please make contributions of additional data points, comments, and questions in a comment below.
Update 2010.07.9
Telecom equipment/services giant Ericsson announced that the 5-billion global mobile subscriber mark occurred on 8 July and subscriptions are growing at a rate of ~2 million per day. This puts the world on track to reach ~5.4 million mobile devices (mobile/smart phones, 3G tablets, etc.) by the end of 2010. The company also puts 3G subscribers at over 500 million. (Sony Ericsson phones are noted for their absence of PVC/BFR.)
Estimating Global Gear
Fitting diverse, overlapping, and sometimes conflicting external data points into a model while preserving internal integrity is key to our methodology. The challenges can be illustrated by a couple of examples.
One is our still in-progress first pass at the e-waste potential of all this gear. The frequently cited figure for global mobile phone discards is ~400 million per year. This comes to an average unit life of 8.5 years calculated against the entire 2008 installed base. Even measured against the 2007 base, that is a 7 year life.
How realistic is this 7-8 year number? We know that first user retention is much shorter in developed countries. This might be offset by potentially longer retention rates among emerging user communities, reuse, and discard latency due to stored unused phones. The bottom line is that is is difficult to know exactly how many mobile devices are irresponsibly discarded every year worldwide. But we do know it is 100s of millions.
Another is mobile devices. The IEA estimated in 2009: "By 2010 there will be over 3.5 billion mobile phones subscribers..." On the other hand, the ITU estimate in 2009 there were 4.1 billion mobile subscribers in 2008. Now, a year later, compare these with Ericsson's numbers, above.
Post new comment