A picture is worth a thousand words. Thanks to Ben Joffe for this picture, which is slide 21 of his presentation, The Digital Silk Road.
Of course, this is a simplification, as it misses China.
China doesn't have 3G yet but they have more mobile phones than any other country and they are fast to adopt what can work on 2.5G. For example, the Chinese adopted ringback tones very very rapidly after the application emerged in Korea -- years ahead of Europe or the US. And, even at 2.5G speeds today, China supports a rich variety of mobile applications.
Likewise, while China's relative proportion of Internet connections above 5 Mbps is relatively small, there are more broadband Internet connections in China than in the US and China is adding new fiber Internet connections faster than any other country in the world.
Thanks for your quote! We have other graphics showing users figures, but we found that putting more than 2 dimensions in a graphic gives us headaches :-) I'll try to add some in the next presentation! Usually keynotes are 5~30 minutes depending on events which limits what we can show ^_^;
Posted by: Benjamin Joffe | November 13, 2008 at 09:13 PM