Notice: This is only a preliminary collection of relevant material
The data and research currently presented here is a preliminary collection or relevant material. We will further develop our work on this topic in the future (to cover it in the same detail as for example our entry on World Population Growth).
If you have expertise in this area and would like to contribute, apply here to join us as a researcher.
This entry presents data on the adoption and diffusion of particular technologies across the world.
This visualisation details the rates of diffusion and adoption of a range of technologies in the United States, measured as the percentage of US households with access or adoption over time. Specific definitions of what constitutes ‘adoption’ or ‘diffusion’ of each technology can be found in the ‘Sources’ tab of the chart.
We were pointed to the relevant sources by Horace Dediu, who documents, blogs and analyses technological change over time. We have tracked down all of his original sources and assembled our dataset based on these original sources.
Fixed (landline) telephone adoption
Mobile phone adoption
Mobile money account adoption
Internet access & technology
We discuss internet use and access over time in more detail in our entry on the Internet.
Road vehicles
The chart here shows landline and mobile phone subscriptions (per 100 people) by country over time. You can change the country in view using the ‘Change country’ option on the chart.
Typically we see that trends for higher-income countries show a distinct pattern, as shown for the United Kingdom in the chart. Landline subscriptions grow from 1960 onwards, generally peaking in the late 1990s, before steadily declining post-Millennium. This decline coincides with the rapid uptake of mobile phone subscriptions from the 1990s.
If we compare this to trends for lower-income countries (for example, Gambia), we see that there has been negligible adoption of landline telephones (reaching only a few per 100 people). However, growth in mobile phone adoption has shown rapid uptake since 2000 (often exceeding 100 mobile subscriptions per 100 people). This is often called the ‘leapfrogging effect’: lower-income countries have effectively leapfrogged/surpassed the earlier landline phone technology and have embraced modern mobile technology instead.
