Three-quarters of people over 10 own a mobile phone: UN

Nearly three quarters of people over the age of 10 now own a mobile phone, potentially opening the way to broader internet use, the United Nations said yesterday. The UN's International Telecommunication Union has provided its first estimate of regional and global ownership, revealing that 73 percent of the world's population over 10 years of age owned a cellphone in 2022. Unsurprisingly, ownership was highest in wealthy countries, where 95 percent of people currently own a mobile phone, and lowest in low-income countries, where only 49 percent do, the ITU said. The UN's telecoms agency says roughly a third of the planet has still never been online. But the online population has been increasing and an estimated 5.3 billion people, or 66 percent of people worldwide, are now using the internet.