6B mobile connections by the end of 2011. Wow!

The total number of global mobile connections are going to go past the six billion mark by the end of 2011 according to a forecast from Wireless Intelligence, the research arm of the trade group, GSMA. Wireless Intelligence is forecasting about 6.07 billion connections at the close of the year. Just for context the global population will nudge past seven billion people by the end of October 2011.

Thanks to booming demand in Asia and Africa along with Brazil and China, nearly 1 billion connections were added in last 16 months alone. We had hit the 5 billion mobile connections mark in July 2010, 18 months after we went past the 4 billion mark. We should expect these numbers to rise sharply. As my colleague, Kevin Tofel pointed out

As more devices become connected through the Internet of things, the overall connection numbers should rise accordingly. E-book readers such as the Kindle, automobiles, upcoming and current tablets, not to mention cameras, are all getting connected.

Here are some interesting tidbits from the report.

* The Asia-Pacific region will rise to account for 50 percent of all connections by year-end.
* Two-thirds of the Asia-Pacific total relates to China and India. Both countries are projected to have over billion connections each next year.
* Six of the world’s top ten largest mobile markets will be in Asia-Pacific.
* By the end of this year, Africa will overtake the Americas as the second-largest regional market with 648 million connections or 11 percent of the total.
* Eastern Europe will become bigger than Western Europe in terms of connections.
*GSM is expected to account for 73 percent of global connections in the fourth quarter, followed by WCDMA/HSPA (16 percent) and CDMA (9 percent)

We will be talking about the Internet of Things and implications of an increasingly mobile society at the end of this month during our Mobilize 2011 conference in San Francisco.