Ericsson -- one of the world's top-tier infrastructure suppliers for mobile networks -- has crunched some numbers recently, figuring the five billionth cellphone line came into existence last Wednesday, July 8, largely from major surges in uptake in emerging markets like China and India. Mobile broadband access (which we take to mean access to 3G speeds and beyond) still trails significantly at just 360 million in 2009, though they're predicting a cool 3.4 billion users by 2015. To put things in perspective, Ericsson points out that we were at 720 million mobile lines in 2000 (and about 2.7 billion in 2007), so that's some pretty spectacular growth over the de
