Telecom and Vodafone have more than 3.6 million cellphone subscribers between them - which works out to a stunning 85% of our population, according to an over-excited NZ Herald. In real-terms the saturation's not quite at that level, as many people have one mobile for work and one for home, and every second teenager seems to juggle Telecom and Vodafone handsets to sneakily hop from free week-day txting to free weekend txting). Still, it's a fact that in the past year alone they've added 500,000 accounts between them. Nice growth. But check out these stats for India's total number of cellphone users, quoted in The Economist (Jan 13):

Year: subscribers in millions
2001: 5.6
2002: 10.7
2003: 28.2
2004: 47.6
2005: 75.8
2006: 136.7

136.7 million sounds a lot, granted, but it's still only around 15% of India's population ...