Werbach asks:
"...Sweden now has a mobile phone penetration rate of 100.1%. In other words, there are more mobile phone accounts than people in the country, largely because many subscribers have both home and business mobile numbers. And Sweden are nearly twice as many mobile phone accounts as fixed lines -- 9 million to 5.4 million. Is this the future of telecom?"
Yup. I think our use of machines follows a power-law relationship (intuitively, I don't know anyone that's ever done the study...). Any machine that makes it to the 'power' part of the curve is going to have a higher penetration close to or higher than 100%. Think about TV, PCs, etc.
Interestingly, the growth of the mobile industry in the Third World has been absolutely (unbelievably) explosive - largely because mobile, relative to fixed-line, which is still government controlled, is higher-quality, you can take it with you, and not much more $$. Oh, wait - that's the value proposition
everywhere.