I think we can take it as a given that no one in their right mind is going to light up the Kalahari desert with broadband fiber, or the northern Yukon--where they say it's so cold, even light freezes. So, there, for one, are a couple of places on this Earth the Internet will never reach, forever digitally dark and divided. Right?
Not so fast. According to the world's leading telecommunication firms, more than half of their first quarter of 2008 $8 billion in monthly data revenues came from wireless Internet access, which is an increase of more than 40% over just a year ago. Impressive numbers in anybody's book.
Today, nearly 1.5 billion people--that's roughly 23 percent of the world's population--have Internet access, and that is a 100% increase from only five years ago. And what's behind this increase? More fiber? DSL? No, the majority is due to the exponential growth of cell phone networks in developing countries, where land-lines are rare and fiber more or less unheard of.
Cell phones and networks, on the other hand, proliferate. And as these cell phone graduate from voice only instruments to voice and data wonders, along with better and better applications--and a healthy helping of Moore's Law which makes sure these application fit on these new, and sometimes scary, inventions (like the iPhone, the Nokia Internet Tablet, and others)--they bring more and more of the Internet into the palm of your hand.
It strikes me that in the end, what will bridge the divide is not going to be strands of fiber, but another advance of cell towers into the Kalahari or the Yukon.
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