There are now 6.92 billion phone connections and 6.915 billion people on Earth, according to Mobile-ent.biz. Of course, this doesn't mean that everyone has a phone. Of all those phones 5.6 billion are mobiles with 200 million more added in the final quarter of 2010 alone.
John Tysoe, an analyst at The Mobile World, says: "Since the turn of the century, the world's mobile phone base has grown more than tenfold, to the point where mobile connections outnumber fixed lines by four to one.
And while this figure does not imply 100% universal phone access, that goal is coming closer. The industry continues to defy predictions that the rate of progress must slow."
On a closely related topic, the mobile is now the most owned object on earth, recently surpassing the toothbrush.