Zoo Station

One of the worst business decisions by AT&T (the Ma Bell version) was to fold up its mobile phone business in the early 80's, having been advised that the total number of mobile phones in existence in the year 2000 would not exceed 1 million. As it turns out, they were only about 699 million subscribers off. Mobile phone users crossed the 1 billion mark in 2002. It took 3 years for another billion users to be added. And now comes news that the number of users has crossed 2.5 billion. In other words, 500 million users have been added in less than 12 months, which means we ought to reach 3 billion users by end-2007, which is truly astonishing. 20 years to get to 1 billion, 3 years to get to 2 billion and less than 2 years to get to 3 billion. Most of the new connections are being added in developing countries, with China and India alone adding 5 million new users every month. This sort of exponential growth is unprecedented in the annals of technology. I cannot think of any other technology which grew quite as rapidly, or for that matter one where growth was driven by phenomenal adoption in developing countries. Can you?