Steve Underwood (steveu@coppice.org) on 8/23/10 wrote:
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>rwessel (robertwessel@yahoo.com) on 8/23/10 wrote:
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>>And I’m not forgetting the non-US market, but that will only increase those numbers by a small factor.
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>Th 95% of the world that is not the US will only increase the market by a small factor? Interesting :-)


Counting both mobile and landlines, about 8% of the world's telephones are in the U.S.

Counting only landlines, it's more like 13%.

And the utilization of the billions of cell phones in poorer parts of the world is often fairly low (do you want to buy minutes or food?) compared to places like the U.S., Europe, Japan, etc... In the U.S., mobile usage is about 21 minutes per day (CTIA 2H2009 survey: 285M phones, 1.12T minutes). Africa, for example, has more (2007: 250M phones - Columbia Earth Institute Report, probably 400-500M now), but the utilization is under 3 minutes per day (all the prior numbers are easy to find - but I can't find a reference for this last one, although I did read it somewhere earlier this year). Texting is particularly popular in poor regions.

If I had to guess, I'd guess that the U.S. accounts for something between a fifth and an eighth of the world's call volume, with Europe contributing a similar amount (probably a bit more). And yes, that's in the range of a "small factor", as far as I'm concerned, although I certainly could have been clearer.

But no matter what, the upper limits are not that high. Even if the other 95% of the world's population suddenly jumped up to U.S. usage levels, the maximum surge levels would be not more than a (very) few hundreds of millions of streams.