Four billion of anything is a lot, but when there are 4 billion telephone lines, you have to stop and think about how quickly we humans have spun our nets of cable.
There are 1.27 billion landlines (you know, those "wire" things still have some use) and a whopping 2.68 billion mobile lines. Most of the mobile lines are in third-world nations, where infrastructure deployment is difficult. China and India (being nearly half of the world’s population) account for a large chunk of those lines, and the U.S. certainly has its share.
In fact two-thirds of all our fellow space travelers on Starship Earth could have a unique number if they were all spread around evenly, but how many people do you know with only one number?
While 61 percent of the world’s mobile lines are distributed among the developing countries, the developed world is steadily building its own telecommunications equipment and adding lines daily.
It only took 11 years to move from 1 billion fixed-and mobile-line subscribers to the 4 billion lines we have today.
More than 1 billion people use the Internet worldwide, and the U.S. is swiftly being left behind in the net availability race. China will soon take our top spot on the list of most-connected nations, and we rank somewhere in the lower half of the top 40 nations when you consider only broadband connectivity in homes and businesses. South Korea has the most aggregate bandwidth of any country, and Japan isn’t far behind.
If we as Americans are to remain competitive in our academic and commercial endeavors, we need to start taking risks in the telecom industry. Rather than merely developing a new technology, we need to use it stateside. We have so many resources and so much more talent than most other countries that the newest iPod packing 160 GB shouldn’t constantly wow us, and we shouldn’t consider cell phones with built-in Breathalyzers to be more than mere toys.
We should think those items passÈ, and we should move on to things such as instantaneous location recognition over GPS and a camera that can capture any image, no matter the angle of the image, no matter the weather conditions.
In this world of constant connection to work and play, our gadgets should help us do both, but separately. Work is not something to do in bed or at dinner. Leave the CrackBerry off when you go home. You left work an hour ago, and they shouldn’t expect you to jump when they call on your downtime.
But you shouldn’t expect to lollygag on their time, either. Leave the Web games at home. If you do your work at the office, they won’t have any reason to call you at home.
Maybe we need 13 billion phone and data lines – work lines and play lines for all.
Conant, an entrepreneurship freshman, can be reached via [email protected]
