The global population will own 6 billion mobile devices by year's end

With the global population not yet over 7 billion, a staggering 6 billion network-connected mobile devices are expected to be floating about our planet by the end of this year.

Nearly one for every human on Earth, Wireless Intelligence forecasts 2011 to end with 6.07 billion connections. One billion have been added in the past year and a half. In July 2010, we hit 5 billion, and 18 months before that, we hit 4 billion.

Most of the growth is coming from the Asia-Pacific region, with China and India to each have more than one billion mobile devices connected in 2012.