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And The Mobile-Phone Leader Is ... Luxembourg?!

The OECD Communications Outlook 2007 is now out, and available for reading online. It has a wealth of useful telecom statistics, including the numbers of mobile-phone subscribers in the 30 OECD countries. The country with the highest penetration rate is (drum roll, please) Luxembourg, believe it or not, with 157.3 mobile subscribers for every 100 people.

No, they're not signing up cats and dogs in the Grand Duchy. The superabundance of subscribers compared with actual people is largely due to users who have several SIM cards for use with the same phone. Luxembourg is one of 14 countries, including Italy, the Czech Republic, and Iceland, that have more subscribers than people. Surprisingly, the mobile-device-crazy countries of East Asia aren't among the leaders in penetration rates, perhaps because Japanese and Koreans don't feel the need for those extra SIM cards. South Korea and Japan do lead, however, in terms of 3G penetration: they are the only countries with more 3G subscribers than 2G ones.

As for Americans, well, we're not exactly living in caves and communicating via hollow logs and smoke signals, but the mobile penetration rate in the United States stands at just above 70%, well below the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average.

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