The future growth of the Internet lies in the hands of mobile phone users, not computers, according to Google Vice President Vinton Cerf. Speaking in Bangalore, India this morning, Cerf said to reporters that while the Internet population has exploded from 50 million to 1.1 billion since 1997, it still only reaches a sixth of the world's population.
The only way to reach the remaining 5.5 billion people on the planet will be to make it more affordable to access the Internet, according to Cerf. Internet access via mobile phone has been slowly gaining momentum in developed countries—over 50 percent of those surveyed toward the end of 2005 had used at least one data service on their phones. However, such mobile access could be the key to quickly getting large populations in developing countries online due of the marginal cost of a mobile phone compared to a computer.
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