In earlier days teledensity was computed as the number of fixed telephone lines per hundred inhabitants.
But this method has become less significant with an increasing number of countries register a trend of mobile cellular subscribers outnumbering the fixed line connections.
Since this method caused disadvantage to some countries where the fixed line network is well established, or others where the mobile network is still in its initial stage of development, effective teledensity has been proposed by International Telecommunication Union (ITU) as the solution, which is defined as either fixed line connections or mobile subscribers per hundred inhabitants – whichever is higher.
This leads to a lack of global standard in the computation of fixed line density and hence ITU has recommended that all the countries shall provide the methodology of calculation of this figure in order to enhance comparability.
The graph is helpful to compare the telephone infrastructure development of different countries or regions, on the basis of teledensity.