One company, half a billion cellphones

In the category of numbers that give one pause: China Mobile announced that it had signed up its 500 millionth subscriber.

As a yardstick, consider that the largest wireless phone operator in the United States, Verizon, boasts a mere 86.6 million subscribers.

Or think of it this way. The current world population is around 6.7 billion. So about 8 percent of the humans living on the planet are China Mobile customers.