An anonymous reader shares a report: A recent survey from Global System for Mobile Communications Association Intelligence (GSMA), the research wing of a U.K.-based organization that represents mobile operators around the world, found that 4.6 billion people across the globe are now connected to mobile internet — or roughly 57% of the world’s population. Now, the rate of new mobile internet subscriber growth is slowing. From 2015 to 2021, the survey consistently found over 200 million coming online through mobile devices around the world each year. But in the last two years, that number has dropped to 160 million.

Rest of World analysis of that data found that a number of developing countries are plateauing in the number of mobile internet subscribers. That suggests that in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Mexico, the easiest populations to get online have already logged on, and getting the rest of the population on mobile internet will continue to be a challenge. GSMA collects data by surveying a nationally representative sample of people in each country, and then it correlates the results with similar studies.

[…] In countries including China, the U.S., and Singapore, a high share of the population is already connected to mobile internet — 80%, 81%, and 93%, respectively. So itâ(TM)s no surprise that the rate of mobile internet subscriptions has slowed. But the rate of new users has also slowed in countries including Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Pakistan — where only 37%, 34%, and 24% of the population currently use mobile internet.