Quarter of globe online

SOME 57% of the people in the developing world have mobile phones and a quarter of the globe has internet access, a UN report said yesterday.

There were an estimated 4.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions at the end of last year, compared with about a billion in 2002, the International Telecommunication Union said.

An estimated 1.7bn people were online last year, up from 11% in 2002.

But four out of five people living in poor countries had no access to the internet, with China comprising a third of the people online in the developing world.