Active Mobile Phones Outnumber Humans for the First Time

For the first time ever people are outnumbered on Earth by mobile devices.

A comparison of real-time data from mobile network analysis firm GSMA Intelligence and the US Census Bureau reveals that the number of active SIM cards surpassed the number of humans some time in the last few weeks.

The number of active mobile devices currently stands at 7.22 billion, whilst there are fewer than 7.2 billion people.

The speed at which the global mobile network is growing suggests that the crossover occured somewhere around the 7.19 billion mark.

The human population is growing at 1.2% annually, which comes in at about two people per second.

The number of devices, on the other hand, is multiplying at a rate five times that.

"No other technology has impacted us like the mobile phone. It's the fastest growing manmade phenomenon ever - from zero to 7.2 billion in three decades," said Kevin Kimberlin, Chairman of Spencer Trask & Co.

Spencer Trask backs Millicom, a startup company that has partnered with Facebook and Internet.org to bring mobile connections to the developing world.

Leonard Gubar, Director of Millicom, hailed the mobile phone as "miraculous." He said: "Today, you can do everything with a mobile phone."

And this trend is set to get even bigger, as much of the developing world remains unconnected.

More than half of the world's population do not have a mobile phone, which means that many in the developed world actively use more than one SIM card.

That's not all though. GSMA's data also considers machine-to-machine networks, the mobile devices that communicate exclusively with other devices, for instance smart meters. There are around 250 million machine-to-machine connections, according to CNET.

That number is, in fact, just enough to push active mobile devices beyond the current human population count.

So, by some measurements, we're still ahead. But that won't last.