The telecom sector is one areas of the controversial “digital divide” said to be the restricted to the realm of the “haves” over the “have-nots”. According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), ``Over the last 10 years, the digital divide has been shrinking in terms of numbers of fixed phone lines, mobile subscribers, and Internet users.”
Figure 8: ITU: Closing the Digital Divide
Figure 8 shows that the tremendous growth rate in the developing world is fast closing in with that of the developed world.
In the Philippines, as an outgrowth of deregulation, subscriber take up has increased substantially. According to Nortel, ``The NTC reports that the number of mobile subscribers has doubled since 2002, reaching 32.9 million subscribers at the end of 2004, for a penetration level over 41 percent or an average of two mobile phones for every five citizens.”
In the next few years about 1 in 2 Filipinos would be a mobile subscriber; this means that technological innovation brought about by entrepreneurial undertaking and competition has driven down cost of ownership or increased the affordability levels that have enabled the “have-nots” to enjoy the privileges previously limited to the “haves”. We will see the more of same trend across the digital sphere. Matthews Funds Asia says it best (emphasis mine), ``the lifeblood of technology industries is still innovation. It sustains the industry through varying economic cycles. It is embedded in the strategies of successful companies. Asian technology appears to be headed toward an equilibrium, in which knowledge will be as much a driving force as capital, and marketplace demand more influential than government decree. The real era of innovation in Asia may lie ahead.” 
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