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Andrew Bonwick
Vice President of Product Development at Relm Insurance
Madhav Sheth
CEO of Ai+ Smartphone
Stephen Rose
CEO Render Networks
Smartphones have swarmed the world market. There were about 4.3 billion people in the world who owned a smartphone at the end of 2022. That’s half of the global population. But the number of people or users who accessed the internet through mobiles was even higher than 4.3 billion. There were 4.6 billion people who accessed mobile internet, and 4 billion of them used a smartphone to do it. This means that the remaining 600 million people used a feature phone to access mobile internet. This also means that of the 4.3 billion smartphone users, 300 million didn’t use the mobile internet at all.
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The data was published in GSMA’s sixth annual ‘State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2023’ report. As per the report, 69% or slightly more than two-thirds of global smartphone owners accessed mobile internet on a 4G-enabled device, while 17% used a 5G-enabled device. This figure represents mobile phones that are largely in the matured markets such as East Asia and Pacific and North America.
Note that 69% of smartphones used to access mobile internet in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 33% in the Middle East and North Africa, were still 3G and 2G only mobiles. Thus, most low and middle-income countries don’t have users who can either afford to upgrade to a 4G/5G phone or want to because of low utility for them or because of no access to high-speed networks in the first place.
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