According to a study by Sweden based wireless equipment maker, LM Ericsson AB, the number of mobile phone subscriptions around the world touched five billion last week.

The company collected data from service providers around he world. According to the report there were only 720 million wireless subscriptions in 2000.

It is growing trend that people have more than one wireless connection and this the estimate means that less than five billion people have access to services. The world population according to UN and US census bureau estimates is about 6.8 billion. Thus it translates to about 70% of total world population being connected through a wireless subscription.

A significant portion of the growth in the number of subscription recently has come from emerging countries like India and China. Th number of subscriptions grew by two million a day, according to the firm. There are about 800 million mobile phone users in China and about 620 million in India.

In developed countries the numbers have fallen over the last few months and service providers are now attracting customers with more wireless devices and urging them to have multiple subscriptions.

The company has also released its estimates about the global mobile broadband market. It expects the mobile broadband subscriptions to touch 3.4 billion mark by 2015 growing at a similar pace as the mobile market. Errisson say that there will be 50 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020.