Misleading Mobile User Numbers

There’s a common strategy in press releases to mention the number of mobile users there are worldwide as if that is any indication of demand for a service. For example, this press release about a report on putting sports onto mobile phones — which is a great idea that’s likely to take off, so the report is probably a good read for those in the sporting industry — throws out this line: “Over the next five years the number of mobile subscribers globally is expected to grow by around two-thirds, to pass the 2.5 billion level”. While that may be true, the release goes on to talk about “higher speed mobile networks” — without mentioning the fact that at the end of 2004 there were only 16.1 million 3G users, and half of them were in Japan. Nokia reckons that will increase to 70 million by the end of 2005, which is a nice figure but it’s still less than 5% of the mobile population. I know there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with 2.5G networks, but when people start talking about the special content that is available on 3G and how successful it will be, remember the actual percentage of 3G users…

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