In the last week I’ve been thinking about global trends in
telecommunications. After all, every so often I hear people suggest that fixed
lines are on their way out, everything is going wireless, but is there anything
to this? Here’s a plot of some data I got off the World Bank website,
quantifying the number of internet users
and fixed broadband
subscribers;
Plot 1: Access Methods on Earth
If we make the reasonable assumption that a fixed line
subscriber is an internet user, we can see the proportion of internet users is
growing faster than the rate at which individuals are coming online, but fixed
lines are still growing as a share of the wider population.
Just look at the
two equations; ignoring the constant on the end, if we divide the yearly increase in
users by the yearly increase of subscribers we can say that for every new subscription,
we get roughly 3.02 users, and unless it can be shown that the majority of
those new users are coming online via wireless technology, rather than by accessing
the web via someone else’s fixed subscription, we can hardly call wireless a
dominant technology of the future.
To resolve this we will of course need to consider whether wireless technology is making a difference. If this were the
case, we would expect there to be a reasonably strong relationship between the
prominence of mobile technologies and the number of internet users not accounted
for by fixed subscriptions. And, of course, the best data so readily available is of mobile phone subscribers
per 100 people, but here is what happens when we take a random sample of 17
countries, as they were in 2011 (our most recent data point), and plot mobile users against unaccounted for
mobile users (defined as the result of subtracting fixed subscribers from
users).
Plot 2: Mobile users and unaccounted
for users.
I don’t seriously believe there’s a pattern here, in fact the correlation works out at somewhere around -0.17, which is very weak. From one country to the next, there doesn’t seem to be any strong relationship between the number of mobile phone subscribers and the number of users unaccounted for. Access to mobile technology doesn’t seem to be adding any users to the international network and, at best it is an alternate access point.
People are right to say the future is wireless, but it will
involve a backbone of physical wires where the end points are WiFi. This is
because wireless technology actually involves sending a beam of non-visible
light across a particular distance, thus making it unreliable for data quality and security,
and effectively capped by the range of light frequencies we can send the data
across. The shorter the distance, the less likely these are to be a problem because there will be less interference, but as a mainstream means of accessing the web, it
simply won’t cope with the demand for big volumes of data.
