special telephone numbers, significantly shorter than full telephone numbers, which can also be used to address SMS and MMS messages from mobile phones.
Published in Chapter:
Mobile Communications / Mobile Marketing
Suzanne Altobello Nasco (Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USA)
Copyright: © 2010
|Pages: 7
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-611-7.ch075
Abstract
Mobile communications have become so widespread around the world that they are now ubiquitous, mostly due to the widespread availability, adoption, and affordability of mobile technologies. Today, there are almost 5 billion mobile phone subscriptions worldwide. Wireless services have grown at an annual rate of over 20% per annum over the past 8 years and mobile penetration has more than doubled every 4 years. Mobile penetration is now at over 60% worldwide (based on number of mobile subscriptions, not people); this growth is driven mostly by the Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC) economies (Acharya, 2008). China is the largest wireless market, with over 600 million subscribers for mobile services. Reports by the mobile industry’s trade association, Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA), state that the U.S. mobile phone market accounted for over 276 million wireless subscriptions in June 2009 and over 89% of the U.S. population has at least one wireless phone subscription (CTIA, 2009). As of early 2009, worldwide, there are over 1 billion more mobile phones than there are computers (Mandel, 2008).