Over half of world population owned a smartphone at the end of 2022 – GSMA

Over half (54%) of the global population owned a smartphone at the end of 2022, according to GSMA’s annual State of Mobile Internet Connectivity Report 2023 (SOMIC). That translates into some 4.3 billion people.

Of the 4.6 billion people using mobile internet, making up 57 percent of the global population, almost 4 billion did so using a smartphone, representing just under half (49%) of the global number of people. About 600 million people, or 8 percent of the global population, accessed the internet using a feature phone.

Over two-thirds (69%) of smartphone owners accessed mobile broadband on a 4G-enabled device, with 17 percent doing so on a 5G-enabled device, the latter driven largely by mature markets such as North America and East Asia & Pacific. Meanwhile, 69 percent of smartphones used to access mobile internet in Sub-Saharan Africa, and 33 percent in the Middle East and North Africa, were still only 3G-capable, meaning 2G and 3G networks remain an important source of coverage for millions of users in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Many still unconnected

The report noted that 3.4 billion people are still unconnected at end-2022. Most of these lived in areas covered by a mobile broadband network. GSMA calls this the usage gap and noted this gap has fallen slightly, to 38 percent in 2022 from 40 percent of the global population in 2021 (representing 3 billion people). By comparison, only 5 percent of those not using mobile internet live in areas without mobile broadband coverage, called the coverage gap.

Regional discrepancies and a digital divide persist. For example, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia represent the regions with the least connected populations and where the usage gaps are 59 percent and 52 percent respectively. In LMICs, adults in rural areas were still 29 percent less likely to use mobile internet than those in urban areas, while women were 19 percent less likely to use mobile internet than men.

Finally, for the first time, all regions had average download speeds of at least 10 Mbps, with global average download speeds increasing to 34 from 27 Mbps.