70% of People Globally Will Have Internet Access by 2020, ITU Says

Of an estimated 9.2 billion mobile subscriptions expected to be in service by 2020, 7.7 billion will have mobile Internet access, according to the International Telecommunications Union. At that point, about 70 percent of the world’s population will be using a smartphone.

If those forecasts are correct, then dire warnings about the global digital divide will be a sharply less important reality. We likely still have some ways to go in terms of supplied bandwidth, and there still will be coverage gaps.