page_title: Mobile telephony
section_title: Culture and customs
hierarchical_section_title: Mobile telephony / Impact on society / Human behaviour / Culture and customs
caption_attribution_description: English: A blonde woman using a mobile phone on the McCorkle Place lawn at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
context_page_description: Mobile telephony is the provision of telephone services to phones which may move around freely rather than stay fixed in one location. Telephony is supposed to specifically point to a voice-only service or connection, though sometimes the line may blur.
  Mobile phones connect to a terrestrial cellular network of base stations, whereas satellite phones connect to orbiting satellites. Both networks are interconnected to the public switched telephone network to allow any phone in the world to be dialed.
  In 2010 there were estimated to be five billion mobile cellular subscriptions in the world.
context_section_description: Between the 1980s and the 2000s, the mobile phone has gone from being an expensive item used by the business elite to a pervasive,  personal communications tool for the general population. In most countries, mobile phones outnumber land-line phones, with fixed landlines numbering 1.3 billion but mobile subscriptions 3.3 billion at the end of 2007.
  In many markets from Japan and South Korea, to Europe, to Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong, most children age 8-9 have mobile phones and the new accounts are now opened for customers aged 6 and 7. Where mostly parents tend to give hand-me-down used phones to their youngest children, in Japan already new cameraphones are on the market whose target age group is under 10 years of age, introduced by KDDI in February 2007. The USA also lags on this measure, as in the US so far, about half of all children have mobile phones. In many young adults' households it has supplanted the land-line phone. Mobile phone usage is banned in some countries, such as North Korea and restricted in some other countries such as Burma.
  Given the high levels of societal mobile phone service penetration, it is a key means for people to communicate with each other. The SMS feature spawned the "texting" sub-culture amongst younger users. In December 1993, the first person-to-person SMS text message was transmitted in Finland. Currently, texting is the most widely used data service; 1.8 billion users generated $80 billion of revenue in 2006 (source ITU). Many phones offer Instant Messenger services for simple, easy texting. Mobile phones have Internet service (e.g. NTT DoCoMo's i-mode), offering text messaging via e-mail in Japan, South Korea, China, and India. Most mobile internet access is much different from computer access, featuring alerts, weather data, e-mail, search engines, instant messages, and game and music downloading; most mobile internet access is hurried and short.
  Because mobile phones are often used publicly, social norms have been shown to play a major role in the usage of mobile phones. Furthermore, the mobile phone can be a fashion totem custom-decorated to reflect the owner's personality and may be a part of their self-identity. This aspect of the mobile telephony business is, in itself, an industry, e.g. ringtone sales amounted to $3.5 billion in 2005.Mobile phone use on aircraft is starting to be allowed with several airlines already offering the ability to use phones during flights. Mobile phone use during flights used to be prohibited and many airlines still claim in their in-plane announcements that this prohibition is due to possible interference with aircraft radio communications. Shut-off mobile phones do not interfere with aircraft avionics. The recommendation why phones should not be used during take-off and landing, even on planes that allow calls or messaging, is so that passengers pay attention to the crew for any possible accident situations, as most aircraft accidents happen on take-off and landing.
caption: Cellular phones allow people to communicate from almost anywhere at their leisure.
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