Clutter in Vietnam
A reader e-mailed in an image with the title "an unregulated telecoms infrastructure"
By B.G. | WASHINGTON, DC
B.R., a reader in Washington, DC who has just returned from a trip to Vietnam, sent us an image with a single line of explanation: "An unregulated telecoms infrastructure".
According Vietnam's ministry of information and communications, the country's number of fixed and mobile subscribers grew by slightly more than 50% in 2009, to 135m subscribers. (The World Bank lists Vietnam's population as 85m, so the ministry's chart must indicate subscriptions and not subscribers. The growth is impressive, regardless.) The International Telecommunication Union recorded a leap in mobile subscriptions per 100 people from 15 in 2007 to 81 in 2008, the most recent year for which they have data. This doesn't explain the tangle of wires to the right, but it's a good proxy for telecoms growth and supports the numbers from Vietnam. The clutter you see here may be a more direct consequence of rapid expansion than it is of regulation.
If you've got an image of a collision between technology and the world, please send it to babbage at economist dot com.
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