The role of ICTs in the transformation and the experience of travel

Excerpt

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of the worldwide increase in access to information and communications technologies (ICTs) over the past 5 or 6 years. One-third of the global population is now on-line, and global penetration of mobile-cellular telephony had reached 5.9 billion subscriptions in 2011 (ITU 2011). This compares to a world population, over the age of 9, of 5.7 billion in the same year. Between 2006 and 2011, there was a doubling in the number of mobile-cellular broadband subscriptions, a type of higher-order service that supports mobile and rapid sharing of larger volumes of data (ITU 2011). With regard to growth in information infrastructure, Europe leads the world in terms of the supply of bandwidth, with an average per user of nearly 90,000 bits per second. The Americas (including Canada and the US) follow, yet clear global disparities persist. In Africa, for example, the average bandwidth per user is around 2,000 bits per second (ITU 2011). …