(Telecompaper) There will be 6.8 billion mobile phone users by the end of this year, almost as many as there are people on the planet, according to the latest statistics from the ITU. Access to mobile broadband is still much lower, but growing quickly. Almost 50 percent of the world's people are covered by 3G networks, and almost 30 percent or 2.1 billion use mobile broadband. The number of users of 3G and 3G+ networks is growing at an average annual rate of 40 percent, the ITU said. The study also looks at the most highly developed information societies, in the ITU's ICT Development index. This was led in 2013 by South Korea for a third consecutive year, followed closely by Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Finland and Norway. The strongest improvements in IDI over the past 12 months were UAE, Lebanon, Barbados, Seychelles, Belarus and Costa Rica. ICT development in many countries has been helped by the fall in the price of bandwidth. In the period 2008-2012, fixed-broadband prices fell by 82 percent, from 115.1 percent of average monthly income per capita in 2008 to 22.1 percent in 2012. The average price per Mbps also decreased significantly, with a global median price of USD 19.50 per Mbps in 2012 almost a quarter of that charged in 2008. The results also showed that in developing countries mobile broadband is now more affordable than fixed broadband, but still much less affordable than in developed countries. Austria has the world's most affordable mobile broadband, while Sao Tome and Principe, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have the least affordable.